A large observational study reports that adults who did about 90 to 119 minutes of resistance training a week had lower mortality rates than those who reported none, including lower rates of cardiovascular and neurological disease death.
The finding comes from a British Journal of Sports Medicine paper led by Yiwen Zhang of the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. This is one study, not settled consensus, and the design can show an association rather than prove that strength training caused the lower risk.
We are writers, not clinicians. What follows is a reading of the research, not medical advice.
What the study measured
The paper drew on three long-running US cohorts: the Health Professionals Follow-up Study, the Nurses’ Health Study, and the Nurses’ Health Study II. Together they included 147,374 participants, 31,540 men and 115,834 women, who were followed for up to 30 years.
Participants reported their weekly resistance training and aerobic exercise at the start of follow-up and then every two years. The study counted 35,798 deaths during follow-up, an important absolute number to hold beside the relative-risk figures. The main estimates were hazard ratios, which compare the rate at which deaths occurred in one group with the rate in a reference group.
Compared with people reporting no resistance training, those reporting 90 to 119 minutes a week had a 13% lower risk of death from any cause after adjustment for aerobic activity. In the same category, the study reported a 19% lower risk of cardiovascular mortality and a 27% lower risk of neurological disease mortality.
Those percentages are relative comparisons. They should not be read as meaning that 27 out of every 100 people avoided neurological disease death. The abstract reports the overall number of deaths, but not simple absolute death rates for each cause in each training category.
The two-hour result is a plateau, not a rule
The most eye-catching part of the study is the dose-response curve. In the authors’ analysis, lower mortality risk appeared to plateau at around 120 minutes of resistance training a week. Above that point, the paper did not find an additional longevity benefit.
That is not the same as saying more than two hours is harmful, or that 119 minutes is meaningfully different from 121 minutes. The study did not capture the exact type of lifting, the intensity of the work, the number of sets, or how the minutes were distributed. Different routines could land in the same time category.
The cancer findings also did not follow exactly the same pattern. In the abstract, reduced cancer mortality was reported only at lower levels of resistance training: 1 to 29 minutes a week and 30 to 59 minutes a week. That difference is a reminder that one exercise dose may not map neatly onto every disease outcome.
Aerobic exercise still mattered
The study did not frame resistance training as a replacement for aerobic activity. The authors examined the two together and found the lowest mortality risks among participants who combined substantial aerobic activity with resistance training, as well as among those with very high aerobic activity regardless of their resistance training category.
That matters because the public-health advice has long included both kinds of activity. The Physical Activity Guidelines for Americans recommend that adults do 150 to 300 minutes of moderate-intensity aerobic activity, or 75 to 150 minutes of vigorous-intensity aerobic activity, each week, plus muscle-strengthening activities involving all major muscle groups on two or more days a week.
The new paper fits that broad structure rather than overturning it. Its added contribution is that it gives a long-term cohort estimate for resistance training minutes, including cause-specific deaths, while accounting for aerobic activity.
Why causation is the hard part
The study’s size and follow-up time are strengths. Repeated questionnaires are also better than asking once and assuming a person’s exercise habits never change. But the evidence is still observational.
People who reported more resistance training tended to differ from people who reported none. They may have had different diets, body weights, smoking histories, medical care, incomes, work patterns, and baseline health. Statistical adjustment can reduce some of those differences, but it cannot make an observational study behave like a randomized trial.
Self-report is another limitation. People often misremember or simplify exercise habits, and “resistance training” can mean different things to different participants. The paper’s abstract says the questionnaires were validated, but even validated questionnaires are not the same as device-measured training volume or supervised exercise logs.
There is also a population issue. These cohorts are built around health professionals, especially nurses and male health professionals. They are valuable datasets, but they are not a perfect mirror of the general population.
What the result does and does not say
The cleanest reading is that moderate, long-term resistance training was associated with lower mortality in this dataset, and that the apparent benefit did not keep increasing past about two hours a week. The study does not show that everyone should train exactly 90 to 119 minutes, nor does it define the best program for an individual body, age, injury history, or medical condition.
It also does not mean resistance training works only through one pathway. Strength work may relate to health through muscle mass, glucose metabolism, blood pressure, balance, body composition, mobility, or other factors. This study was not designed to identify the mechanism behind the association.
For readers with cardiovascular disease, neurological symptoms, chronic conditions, injuries, or uncertainty about starting exercise, a clinician or qualified exercise professional is a better guide than a single observational paper.
The useful takeaway is narrower and more durable: in a very large group followed for decades, people reporting regular but moderate resistance training had lower death rates than those reporting none, and doing much more than two hours a week did not appear to add further longevity benefit in the model.