The wonder of weightlifting | Jaime Seeman (re-release)

0:02You're listening to TED Talks Daily, where we bring you new ideas to spark your curiosity every day. I'm your host, Elise Hu. Growing up, obstetrician and gynecologist Jaime Seeman loved sports, but she couldn't help comparing herself to the images of beauty she saw everywhere, feeling like she never quite measured up. This was before influencers and filters, when the standard came from magazine covers. Those Cosmo cover girls, well, they didn't have a lot of muscles. Frankly, they looked kind of frail, somewhat unhealthy. But to the world, they were beautiful and they were idolized. And as a young girl, I let that frame the way that I looked and thought about myself.

0:44That pressure to look a certain way doesn't just shape how we see our bodies, it shapes how we care for them. In this talk, Jamie, for whom weightlifting is a passion, takes on the myths that keep women out of the weight room. Through her own life and her work with patients, she's found something genuinely alarming. That strength training, one of the most powerful things any of us can do for our health, is still something a lot of women are told isn't for them. You've seen it when you walk into the gym, this big room of treadmills, ellipticals, and stair climbers filled with women. But in the Journal of Exercise Science, they found for every woman that was using the free weight section of the gym, there was 27 men.

1:25Jamie makes the case that building muscle isn't about how you look, it's about health. And in some cases, it can quite literally be the difference between life and death. It's all coming up right after a short break.

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4:21And now, our TED Talk of the day. As a little girl, I loved playing sports. I also loved painting my fingernails and parading around my mother's house in her high-heeled shoes. From the beginning of time, I have lived in contrasting worlds, contrasting and often conflicting ideas about what women should and shouldn't do, or maybe how we should and shouldn't look. A pivotal moment came for me when I was a sophomore in high school. My mother took me to an audition for a modeling agency. And I can't tell you how nervous I was that day or even what I was wearing, but I will never forget the way I felt the next morning.

5:04As I was walking into school, I got a phone call. They wanted to sign me as a plus size model. I was a size 10, by the way. If I could go back and talk to that 16-year-old version of myself, I would tell her exactly what my own mother told me that day. You were built for bigger and better things. So I turned down their offer and I went on to play NCAA college softball, where I was a weightlifter of the year, twice. I loved being in the gym and I loved throwing those heavy weights around. But what I really loved the most was the confidence that my physical strength instilled in me. But there was always this nagging feeling, this sort of whisper in the back of my mind.

5:53And it sounded a lot like the voice on the phone that day, telling me that I was different, somehow not ideal, because I would shrink inside every time somebody commented on my muscular body. You see, at the time, the only social media we had was something called Cosmopolitan Magazine. And those Cosmo cover girls, well, they didn't have a lot of muscles. Frankly, they looked kind of frail, somewhat unhealthy. But to the world, they were beautiful and they were idolized. And as a young girl, I let that frame the way that I looked and thought about myself. And this is the problem. Even though something like weightlifting has a multitude of proven health benefits, there continues to be a stigma for women based on cultural and societal myths about what women should and shouldn't do.

6:50I believe that if we can create a new culture that shifts the focus from aesthetics to health, that women's health and frankly everybody's health could be transformed forever. Now I'd like to be able to tell you that after college I continued to train really hard in the gym, ate a perfect diet amidst a family and children and a stressful career. But that is not what happened. What really happened is I went to medical school, I survived residency, I got married and had three children, and I woke up one day dealing with the same metabolic diseases that I was helping my own patients manage through medication.

7:32I could see it, I could feel it, but I told myself that I would just take care of it when I had more time. And so many of us let ourselves believe that we have a lot of time. Now, according to the CDC, the top three killers of women is heart disease, cancer, and stroke. The major contributing factor to these causes of death is what I call metabolic disease. And even though our modern, high-fat, high-carbohydrate, highly processed diets play a major role, there's one thing that women are not doing across their lifespan that could tremendously reduce their risk of death, and that is building muscle.

8:18The data is actually very clear when it comes to resistance training. So why aren't more women doing it? The answer lies in three primary myths that continue to exert a powerful force and prevent women from doing just that. Myth number one is that if we lift weights, we're going to get big and bulky. Women think that if they pick up a 20-pound dumbbell that they will somehow look like Arnold Schwarzenegger. Now, I can tell you that it takes years of very serious training and steroids to accumulate that kind of look. And if you take a look around the gym, you can see that achieving the physique of somebody like the Hulk is actually difficult, even for most men.

9:08Now, we're all born with a certain genetic potential when it comes to our muscle size and distribution. But beyond that, it takes years of very serious training and a concerted effort to build and maintain that lean tissue. Although women have a similar relative natural muscular potential to men, we're also prone to the same age-related muscle loss. And the medical term for that is called sarcopenia. On average, after age 40, we lose about 1 % of our muscle size. With these age-related declines, we become weak, we become frail, and the risk of all chronic diseases starts to go up. In a study, they found the more days, time, and effort that women devote to strength training, the better their body composition is.

9:58Myth number two is that weightlifting is hard, or maybe too hard on our bodies. You see, even as women, if we make a decision to go work out, we're more likely to choose the cardio equipment. But let me dispel this myth. Strength training meets you where you're at. The first day you're in the gym, you're not going to be doing a 500-pound back squat. It's about being stronger today than you were yesterday. But we don't have the same role models when we walk into the gym. Because when we walk in and we see this man with multiple plates on the bar, and he's making crazy faces and even crazier sounds, it's not very inviting to most women.

10:45But you see, women actually have an advantage over men in certain parts of our life. We make more estrogen than men. And estrogen means that we don't fatigue as fast and we actually recover faster, which means that we can handle more volume in weight training without overtraining. Myth number three is that weightlifting is for the boys and aerobics is for the girls. You've seen it when you walk into the gym, this big room of treadmills, ellipticals, and stair climbers filled with women. But in the Journal of Exercise Science, they found for every woman that was using the free weight section of the gym, there was 27 men.

11:30This disparity continues to make it difficult to foster health for women across their lifespan. Resistance training happens to be the only non-pharmacological intervention that has been consistently shown to offset these age-related declines in skeletal muscle mass, strength, and power. This cannot be achieved on a treadmill. The male bias in gym culture is literally everywhere, and it's time for us to counter it. All humans have muscles. Muscles make us healthy. Muscles combat the top three killers of women. Resistance training meets you where you're at. We think that we need these fancy machines and free weights to build muscle.

12:18But in a 2021 study, they examined a population of women 65 and older. They put these women through body weight and resistance band training three times per week for 16 weeks. And do you know what they found? In the treatment group, these women improved their strength, improved their functional fitness, improved their grip strength, and even improved their gait speed. The amount of work required to see benefit is actually quite small. You can lift weights, you can lift your groceries, you can lift your children, or when you're first starting, you can even just lift your own body weight. it's my mission to make sure that women live a long and healthy life and that means building and maintaining their muscle what made me realize the urgency of my own health problems is when I lost one of my best friends very suddenly at the age of 29 and there I stood face to face with my own mortality.

13:25I was weak. I was tired. What was missing? Something that I had literally wished away after college. Muscle. I knew I had to get back into the gym and start training again, but I had to get over the fact that through my formative years, society told me that muscles were for boys. Two years after I set out to regain my health, I competed on a show called Titan Games with real everyday heroes. And in that same year, I competed at the Mrs. America pageant. Doing both of these things in the same year was my attempt to shatter the cultural stereotypes that continue to tell us that muscles are just for men.

14:11So let me leave you with a very clear call to action. Start lifting heavy things now. Nobody can do it for you. Literally. Your older self will thank you. Or if you are your older self, it's never too late. This is not about aesthetics. This is about health. And physically strong women are healthy women. Thank you.

14:44That was Jamie Seaman at TEDx Greenhouse Road in Texas in 2023. This talk was originally published in August 2025. If you're curious about TED's curation, visit ted.com slash curation guidelines. And that's it for today. TED Talks Daily is a podcast from TED. This episode was fact-checked by the TED Research Team and produced and edited by our team, Martha Estefanos, Oliver Friedman, Lucy Little, Emma Taubner, and Tansika Sunglarnival. Additional support from Daniela Ballarezzo, Christopher Faze-Bogan, Valentina Bohanini, Banban Chang, Brian Green, and Lainey Lott. Learn more at podcasts.ted.com.

15:27I am Elise Hu. I'll be back tomorrow with a fresh idea for your feet. Thanks for listening. Thank you.

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