The Strength Training Dose Linked to Lowest Mortality Is About an Hour a Week

Aerobic exercise has decades of mortality data behind it. Resistance training has far less, largely because it is harder to measure — people can estimate how far they ran, but "how much do you lift" has no natural unit. A 2022 meta-analysis in the British Journal of Sports Medicine pooled 16 prospective cohort studies to answer the question anyway, and produced something more useful than a yes or no: a dose-response curve.

The headline association is modest and consistent. Adults reporting any muscle-strengthening activity, compared with none, had roughly 15% lower all-cause mortality — a relative risk of 0.85. Cardiovascular disease came in at 0.83, total cancer at 0.88, and type 2 diabetes at 0.83. These are not dramatic numbers, but they are remarkably stable across different outcomes, which is usually a sign that something real is being measured.

The dose curve is where it gets interesting. Rather than improving steadily with volume, the relationship was J-shaped for mortality, cardiovascular disease and cancer, with the maximum risk reduction — around 10 to 20% — landing at approximately 30 to 60 minutes per week. Not per day. Per week. Beyond roughly an hour, the curve stopped improving and, in the pooled data, appeared to turn back.

That last detail is the one most likely to be misreported, so it deserves care. The apparent loss of benefit above 60 minutes rests on a small number of studies using self-reported weekly training minutes, and the authors themselves graded it low-certainty. The honest reading is that 30 to 60 minutes appears sufficient to capture most of the association — not that additional training is harmful. Anyone lifting four times a week for other reasons, whether strength, body composition or simple enjoyment, has no evidence here to worry about.

Diabetes behaved differently, showing an L-shaped curve with benefit accruing up to about 60 minutes and then flattening rather than reversing.

One further number is worth holding onto. Combining strengthening activity with aerobic exercise, compared with doing neither, was associated with a relative risk of 0.60 for all-cause mortality — a substantially larger association than either alone.

Why this matters for tracking: the practical implication is that resistance training has an unusually favourable effort-to-association ratio at the low end, and that most of the available benefit sits within reach of two half-hour sessions a week. If you are logging training load, it is worth recording strength work in minutes rather than sessions, so the volume can be compared against this curve directly. And if you currently do none, the data suggests the first hour per week is the most valuable hour you will ever add — with the caveat that all of this is observational, and self-reported training time is a famously optimistic measurement.