New research has a simple message for older women: Muscle matters for living a longer, healthier life.

The study, published in JAMA Network Open, followed thousands of women over the age of 62 and makes clear that even small changes can have a meaningful impact.

Getting those benefits doesn’t require an army of hulked-out grandmas. Rather, older women need to expand their workouts beyond aerobic exercise to include some basic strength training.

That finding was made possible by the Women’s Health Initiative, the landmark research effort that closely followed tens of thousands of women since the 1990s. As one part of the program, researchers visited women in their homes, measuring their grip strength, blood markers of inflammation and activity levels, among other things.

When researchers looked years later at a group of about 5,500 participants in their 60s to their 90s, what they found was unambiguous: More muscle strength translates into a longer life. It didn’t matter whether a woman spent 150 minutes each week doing aerobic exercise, as the government recommends. Instead, researchers found one surprising factor — grip strength — was linked to longevity.

Epidemiologist Michael LaMonte, who led the study, has a theory about why the grip test was a particularly sensitive measure of overall health: Even as we age, most of us can’t avoid using our quads, hamstrings and glutes — they power everyday activities like getting up out of bed. Yet the upper body can more easily fall into disuse. The subsequent decline can present itself in small but meaningful ways.

“I call it the pickle jar test,” LaMonte says. When the jar gets harder to open, it could be a sign that something is changing — maybe it’s an underlying disease, maybe it’s a decline in muscle mass. “Either way,” LaMonte says, “it should be a yellow caution sign.”

This is especially important for a generation that came up at a time when physical activity guidelines only emphasized aerobic exercise. Researchers have increasingly recognized the importance of muscle mass — not just for living longer, but for maintaining mobility and independence later in life.

These new findings should help refine future federal fitness guidelines. As LaMonte points out, many women will reach a point in life when meeting those aerobic exercise standards is no longer possible. They experience an illness or injury, and they simply can’t make it out for their walk around the neighborhood or to their water aerobics class. The study suggests that even those women can potentially live longer with some focus on maintaining their strength.

What does that look like? For starters, don’t confuse the study’s focus on grip strength as an order to “train your grip,” Stuart Phillips, a professor of kinesiology at McMaster University in Canada, said in an email. “Grip strength is a useful marker. It is not the training prescription. The broader message is that overall strength matters, and general strength training is a big deal for healthy aging.”

It also doesn’t mean older women need personal-training sessions or to join a gym. They can use resistance bands or their own body weight, and for women in their late 70s and beyond, something as basic as lifting soup cans could be enough, LaMonte says. The overarching goal is simply to stimulate those muscles.

That stimulation does matter — for individuals, of course, but also for society. Older adults are the fastest-growing demographic in the U.S., a population that skews heavily female. Getting that group to make small changes that could lead to longer lives would be an incredible feat of public health.

Of course, younger women may wonder what the findings mean for them. Phillips cautions about drawing too many conclusions about longevity and muscle mass in other stages of life. Still, women of all ages would be wise to work weight training into their exercise routines. It doesn’t need to be complicated — no matter what fitfluencers want you to believe.

Last month, the American College of Sports Medicine updated its resistance-training recommendation for healthy adults, and the advice is simple: Just do some sort of full-body resistance training, twice a week. Lots of different kinds of workouts are effective, so tune out the noise suggesting you’re doing something wrong if you’re not “lifting heavy” or “lifting to failure.”

The evidence keeps mounting that women can’t just jazzercise or power walk their way into graceful old age — they need to think about small, consistent ways to ensure their muscles get a workout, too. Older women could use more help — from their doctors and caregivers, and from the federal government, which sets guidance around exercise — putting that into practice. Meanwhile, younger ones should know that building a lifelong practice of strength training will pay dividends.

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This column reflects the personal views of the author and does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.

Lisa Jarvis is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering biotech, health care and the pharmaceutical industry. Previously, she was executive editor of Chemical & Engineering News.

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