There is a number that has been bothering me since I found it.
In a study of 253,423 adults in England, more than two-thirds met the recommended guidelines for aerobic activity. Under a strict definition, nine per cent of women met the guidelines for muscle strengthening.
My first reaction was that this mattered.
My second was more practical: well, of course we don’t.
Two strength sessions a week sounds entirely reasonable written down. But if your week already contains work, a commute, children, a house and everything else that keeps ordinary life moving, “just add two sessions” is still adding two sessions. To a week that doesn’t have room.
So I went looking for what the guidance actually says. And it turns out I’d been arguing with something nobody had asked me to do.
Nobody said gym
The UK Chief Medical Officers recommend activities that develop or maintain strength in the major muscle groups, at least two days a week.
That’s it. That’s the whole instruction.
Here is what the government’s own guidance lists as counting: carrying heavy shopping. Gardening. Yoga. Ball games. Racquet sports. Bodyweight exercises. Resistance bands. And, yes, the gym — but as one option in a list, not the definition.
It also says something that almost never survives into the coverage: any strengthening activity is better than none.
When Sally Davies was Chief Medical Officer she made the point about as plainly as it can be made — she told people to walk to the supermarket and carry the bags home.
That is the official advice. Carry the shopping.
Why nobody knows this
The government has a name for the strengthening half of the guidance. It calls it the forgotten guidelines.
Its own analysis identifies the reason: an unequal emphasis on the aerobic components rather than the strength ones. One half was promoted for twenty years. The other half sat in the same document, unmentioned.
So the 9% figure isn’t a story about women failing to do something. It’s a story about a recommendation that was published and then not communicated — while the aerobic message, promoted relentlessly, reached more than two-thirds of us.
That distinction matters, because it changes what the fix is. If the problem were motivation, the answer would be discipline. If the problem is that nobody told you carrying shopping counts, the answer is considerably cheaper.
What changed in July
The four Chief Medical Officers refreshed the guidelines on 10 July this year.
They didn’t change the targets. What they changed was the emphasis — towards light activity, towards breaking up long periods of sitting, and towards incorporating strength and balance activities throughout life. The guidance now explicitly points people towards walking, cycling, gardening, household tasks and using the stairs, rather than towards structured exercise.
The CMOs’ own line on it: if physical activity were a drug, we would refer to it as a miracle cure.
There’s one genuinely new element, and it tells you where this is heading. The refresh singles out people taking GLP-1 drugs for weight loss or diabetes, noting that when taking them both fat and muscle decrease — and that although the evidence is still emerging, muscle strengthening activity is likely to be of particular importance for maintaining muscle mass.
Strength has moved from something optional to something the government is now specifically flagging to a rapidly growing group of people. That’s the shift.
The honest bit
Here’s where I want to be careful, because this is the point at which wellness writing usually becomes wishful.
Carrying shopping counts towards the guideline. It does not necessarily do everything progressive resistance training does. Muscle adapts when it’s asked to do slightly more than it’s used to — which is why the same shopping bags, week after week, eventually stop being a challenge and start being a Tuesday.
So there are two different questions, and they get muddled constantly:
Does this count? Often, yes. More things count than you think.
Is this enough to keep building? That depends on whether it ever gets harder.
One more thing worth knowing, because it’s the number nobody hears. The guidance sets no minimum duration at all — just two days a week. Separately, the research it draws on found benefits appearing somewhere above thirty minutes of strengthening activity a week, and was honest that there isn’t enough evidence to name a precise dose.
Thirty minutes. Across a whole week. That’s a far smaller number than the culture around strength training implies — though it’s a research finding rather than an official recommendation, and worth holding loosely.
Where it can actually live
Not a programme. Places it can attach to something already happening.
The shopping. Carry it rather than trolley it to the car, and split it into two heavier bags rather than four light ones. Same trip, more load.
The stairs. Two at a time is a different exercise from one at a time. Your legs know the difference even if your diary doesn’t.
While something cooks. Sit-to-stands from a kitchen chair, ten of them, while the pasta boils. Calf raises at the counter. It is faintly ridiculous and it is also the entire mechanism.
The floor. Getting up and down without using your hands is a genuine strength movement, and one of the better predictors of how the next thirty years go.
A resistance band somewhere visible. Not in a drawer. The drawer is where exercise equipment goes to die.
The garden, if you have one. Digging and lifting are strengthening activity by the government’s own definition, not a consolation prize.
None of that is a workout. All of it is load.
And keep walking
I want to be clear about this, because a lot of writing on strength manages to imply that everything else you were doing was insufficient.
Walking is superb. It’s accessible, it’s free, it’s good for your head as well as your heart, and it slots into a life without asking permission. Nothing here replaces it.
The question was never walking or strength. It’s that modern life stopped providing one of them by default. We used to carry things, climb things and lift things as a condition of getting through the day, and then we designed most of that out. Aerobic movement survived the redesign because we still walk places. Muscular load largely didn’t.
So the useful question isn’t what to add. It’s where the load went — and how to put a little of it back.
The reframe that helped me
Stop asking what you want to look like. Start asking what you want to still be able to do.
Train for stairs. For suitcases. For shopping bags. For getting off the floor with a grandchild in your arms, at an age when that is not automatic.
That’s a different project from fitness. It’s cheaper, less glamorous, and it fits inside a life you already have.
Want somewhere to start? T, Re: is my fortnightly newsletter on what’s actually changing in health and wellbeing — no buzzwords, just what holds up when you look at the evidence.
Sign up and the Whole-Life Wellness Audit comes with it: ten minutes, twenty honest questions, scored across Mind, Body, Space and Freedom.
Get the T, Re: → Newsletter
Whole life wellness. Mind, Body, Space and Freedom
