Why Every Woman Should Start Training Like A Powerlifter
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If you think powerlifting means chasing a 400-pound deadlift or stepping on a competition platform, I have good news: that's not what I'm talking about.
And it's not what you need to do to get the benefits.
Powerlifting-style training just means building your workouts around the big compound lifts, the squat, the bench, and the deadlift, and training them with the goal of getting stronger over time. No meet required. No coach yelling at you in a singlet (Unless that's your thing, no judgment, but that's a different article.)
Here's why I think this is the best place almost all women should start, whether you're brand new to lifting or you've been doing bodyweight circuits and light dumbbells for years.
Part of it is mindset. Chasing strength instead of chasing a burn changes how you show up to your workouts and how consistent you are.
But that's only half of the case. Lifting heavy also does things for your body that no amount of cardio or light circuit training will. It protects your bones, fights the muscle loss that comes with age, boosts your metabolism, makes you more resilient to injury, and builds a kind of physical confidence that shows up everywhere, not just in the gym.
If you want the fuller, more free-flowing version of this conversation, Jaime and I talked through it on the podcast. But I want to lay out the full case here, with more depth than we had time for on the show.
What "Powerlifting-Style Training" Actually Means
Let's define this clearly, because the word "powerlifting" can sound a little scary or intimidating if you've never done it.
The sport of powerlifting is three lifts, judged by a panel, at a sanctioned meet. That's not what we're talking about here.
Powerlifting-style training means you organize your workouts around the squat, the bench press, and the deadlift, and you train them with a specific goal: get better at them and stronger at them over time.
Meet Yourself Where You're At
Here's where most women get stuck before they even start. If you've never lifted with a barbell, it can feel intimidating, especially if the only image you have in your head is a bar loaded with more plates than your dishwasher can hold. It's easy to look at that and think there's no way you belong anywhere near a barbell.
That image is the end point, not the starting point, if you even want to go there at all.
The real starting point is you, meeting yourself where you're at. Whatever weight you can lift with good form right now is your starting point. If that's the empty barbell, that's the empty barbell. If that's 65 pounds, that's 65 pounds. The goal is to just get started, and the heavy weights will come later.
Every time you walk into the gym, think of it as practice. You're practicing the squat. You're practicing the deadlift. You're practicing the bench press.
As you get better at the movement itself, the weight on the bar naturally starts to climb. You're not forcing more weight onto a lift you haven't earned yet. You're getting more skilled, and the strength follows.
Progressive Overload
This is where progressive overload comes in.
Think of it like a staircase you're building one step at a time. You don't skip from the ground floor to the fifth story. You place one step, stand on it, get comfortable, then place the next one slightly higher. Each step only has to be a little higher than the last one, not high enough to reach the ceiling in one move.
Progressive overload works the same way. You lift a weight, your body adapts to handle it, and then you add a small amount more. Five pounds. Sometimes even less. You're not trying to jump to someone else's numbers. You're trying to beat your own from last week.
That's why "heavy" is relative. Heavy for you today might be a weight you'll warm up with in six months.
Strength Gains Come Quickly
Strength gains come so quickly with powerlifting-style training, which is exactly what makes it fun. Circuit training could never. Bless it, but it's just not built for that.
Your body adapts fast, faster than it ever will again, and you can add weight to the bar almost every single week, sometimes every session, because everything is a new stimulus your body hasn't had to handle before.
This is also why powerlifting-style training works for someone brand new to lifting and someone who's been at it for years. The beginner is climbing the same staircase as the advanced lifter. She's just closer to the ground floor, and she's climbing it a lot faster. The advanced lifter is still adding steps, but each one takes a lot longer to earn. The process and the mentality are the same either way. The pace just isn't.
Now that you know what this style of training actually looks like, let's talk about why it works so well, and it's not just because of the lifts themselves.
Why the Mentality Shift Is the Real Unlock
It's not just the lifts. It's what focusing on strength does to your head.
Stop Chasing the Burn
Most women walk into the gym asking the wrong question. Did I sweat enough? Did I feel it? How many calories did I just torch?
Training isn't about burning calories. It has very little to do with that, and chasing it will get you stuck. A workout is about building, not losing. It's where you build strength, muscle, work capacity, etc.
Powerlifting-style training gets you asking different questions:
Did I add weight to the bar?
Is my form improving?
Did the weight that felt heavy last week move smoother this week?
Progress Doesn't Lie
Soreness isn't progress. Neither is a good sweat. You can crawl out of the gym on your hands and knees and still be exactly where you were last month.
But progress isn't only about the number on the bar either. Sometimes it's your form improving. Sometimes a weight that used to feel like pulling through wet cement now feels like feathers. Sometimes it's your fifth rep starting to look like your first rep. Strength is the clearest thing to point to here, but there are many ways to measure it.
Why It Gets Addicting
You want to know a trick to staying consistent. Start chasing performance goals. That sh** gets addicting.
As a beginner, it comes fast. You're adding weight almost every session. It’s immediate feedback.
And it's visible. A scale doesn't move that fast. A HIIT class doesn't give you a number to beat next week. You finish, you're sweaty, and you have no idea if you actually did better than last time.
The Confidence That Builds Alongside It
This isn't the confidence of looking a certain way. It's the confidence of knowing you're capable.
Once you've pulled a deadlift you didn't think you could pull, that stays with you. It carries over into your everyday life. It shows up in how you handle a hard day at work. It shows up in your patience with your kids on a long week.
But that's the bonus. The real point of the mentality shift is thinking about building instead of shrinking. Building strength. Building muscle. Eating enough to actually fuel that.
The Benefits of Lifting Heavy Go Way Beyond Aesthetics
Most women think about lifting in terms of how it'll change how they look. Fair enough, that's usually what gets you in the door. But the list of things heavy strength training does for your body is way longer than that, and a lot of it matters more the older you get.
It Protects Your Bones
Bone density is a big deal for women, especially once menopause hits. Estrogen plays a role in keeping bones strong, and when it drops, bone loss speeds up, which is exactly why osteoporosis shows up so much more in women than men.
Heavy resistance training is one of the few things that pushes back against this. Your bones respond to load the same way your muscles do. Put real stress on them, and they adapt by getting denser.
This isn't just theory either — the LIFTMOR trial found that postmenopausal women with low bone mass who did high-intensity resistance training saw real improvements in bone density.
It Fights the Muscle Loss That Comes With Age
You start losing muscle mass as you age, and it picks up speed after menopause. Heavy lifting is the most direct way to fight back. You're not just maintaining muscle, you're actively building it, which puts you ahead instead of just slowing the decline.
It Boosts Your Metabolism
More muscle means a higher resting metabolic rate. Your body burns more just existing, not just during a workout. This matters even more if you're also thinking about body composition, which we'll get into later.
It Makes You More Capable in Everyday Life
Strength training isn't just for the gym. It's for getting off the floor easily, for not needing help moving something heavy, for not thinking twice before you lift something awkward.
It Makes You More Resilient to Injury
Stronger muscles, tendons, and joints handle everyday stress better. A stumble that might've hurt you before doesn't. An awkward lift you weren't planning for doesn't throw your back out.
Bone density plays into this too. Stronger bones mean if you do fall, you're less likely to break a hip or a wrist, and stronger muscles make you quicker to catch yourself before you even hit the ground.
It Helps Your Mood, Too
Resistance training is linked to better mood and stress resilience, and heavy lifting specifically comes with a self-efficacy boost that's hard to find anywhere else.
The Big Three Lifts
Powerlifting focuses on the big three lifts: the barbell back squat, the barbell deadlift, and the barbell bench press. Let's talk about why these are worth focusing on.
Why Compound Exercises Matter
All three are compound exercises, meaning they work multiple muscles at once. That's huge for strength, because your muscles have to work together to move that weight. You're building both intramuscular and intermuscular coordination when you train with compound lifts and heavy weight, which are just fancy terms for getting your muscles to coordinate and work as a team. And as we know, teamwork makes the dream work.
The better your muscles coordinate together, the more weight you're able to lift. Compare that to a bicep curl, where you're isolating just the bicep. You're not going to move nearly as much weight, because you don't have a whole team of muscles pitching in.
Isolation exercises have their place too, for different reasons. You don't want to only do compound lifts. But there are real advantages to building your program around them.
They work multiple muscles at once, which makes your workouts more efficient. Instead of isolating one muscle at a time, you're hitting a bunch of them together in a single lift. They're also fantastic for progressive overload, since it's a lot easier to keep adding weight to a squat or deadlift than it is to a bicep curl.
Compound exercises are also usually very functional, meaning there's real carryover to your everyday life. You're regularly picking things up off the floor, squatting down, pushing things. On top of that, they improve your balance and joint stability, and they build bone, like we covered earlier.
The Deadlift
The barbell deadlift is one of my favorite lifts, for a lot of reasons.
For one, it's one of the easiest lifts to keep adding weight to over time. Lifts like the overhead press or bench press tend to stall a lot faster. With the deadlift, it just feels like you can keep progressing for a long time. (If you want more specific tips on building up your numbers, I've got a whole article on proven ways to hit a new deadlift PR.)
It's also a total body exercise. I don't know of another lift that uses as many muscles as the deadlift does. You're using your entire posterior chain (the muscles along your backside) including your glutes, which a lot of women specifically want to develop, plus a ton of lower body and core.
It looks like a pulling exercise, which would suggest it's mostly upper body. But it's actually more of a hinge that incorporates pulling the bar off the ground. You're pushing the ground away with your feet and hinging at your hips, using your glutes and hamstrings, and that's what brings the bar up with you. That's why it's such a lower body dominant lift even though it looks like your arms are doing the work.
Between working so many muscles and being so easy to progressively overload, it's a great exercise for overall power, strength, and muscle development. And honestly, there's no other exercise that makes you feel as badass as the deadlift does. When you start pulling heavy weight, it feels amazing.
It is a technical lift, meaning there are a lot of pieces to the form, but most people can learn it quickly. Since most people can lift a decent amount of weight with this movement, it's easy to start light and learn the form without hurting yourself. Even if your form isn't perfect in the beginning and you're using a bit too much back, the weight usually isn't heavy enough yet to cause real damage.
The Barbell Back Squat
The back squat is amazing for lower body development, and like the deadlift, it's another lift where it's easy to get stronger and keep adding weight over time. Anything you can get stronger at quickly is great for progressive overload, since you're less likely to get stuck at the same number for months.
(If you want to go deeper on leg-specific training, I've got a whole guide to building bigger, stronger legs.)
The main muscles here are your quads and glutes, but you're also working your upper back for stabilization, your core, and really your entire lower body. It's a lift that demands a lot from your whole body at once, which is part of why it builds so much overall strength, not just leg strength.
It's also one of the more technical lifts to learn well, since depth, bar position, and knee tracking all matter. But like the deadlift, that technical piece isn't a reason to avoid it. You just start with a manageable version and build up your mechanics before you load it heavily. More on this later.
The Barbell Bench Press
The bench press is a great pushing exercise, working mainly your chest, shoulders, and triceps, though plenty of smaller muscles pitch in for stabilization too.
It's easier to load than a lot of other pushing exercises, which makes it satisfying early on since you can add weight fairly consistently. That said, you'll likely hit a wall with it faster than you will with the squat or deadlift. It's still amazing for progressive overload, it just takes more patience once you get past the beginner stage.
Unlike the deadlift and squat, the bench press doesn't tax your nervous system nearly as much, since it doesn't involve your legs or your whole posterior chain. That actually makes it a lift you can often train more frequently without running into the same fatigue issues the other two come with.
Getting Started: A Roadmap
If you're new to any of this, there are ways to progress and work up to it. You don't have to start with the bar. The goal is to get there, but you build up to it first. (For a full beginner program built around these exact principles, check out my strength training program for beginners.)
The Squat
If you don't have solid squat form yet, start with a goblet squat, or an elevated heel goblet squat. Focus on getting the mechanics down before you move to the bar, because the bar version is going to feel different.
Once you get to the bar, focus on improving your form more than adding weight, at first. But don't stay there too long either. Some people get stuck trying to make their form perfect before they'll add any weight at all. Don't do that.
You want to lift safely, and you want to be able to hit depth, meaning your hips get parallel to the floor or your knee hits a 90-degree angle. But you don't need to nitpick every little detail before you add weight. It's completely fine to add weight even when your form isn't perfect. In fact, when you're lifting near your max, your form usually isn't going to look perfect, and that's okay.
The Deadlift
If you're brand new to the deadlift, the first thing you need to master is your hinge. A lot of people struggle here, either squatting the weight up or just bending over at the waist instead of actually hinging.
You can practice this with light Romanian deadlifts. The goal is to hinge your hips back while keeping your knees roughly in place, over your ankles. Your knees aren't shooting forward, and they aren't sliding back with you either. It's your hips doing the moving.
Here's a way to picture it: imagine you're holding a bag of groceries in each hand and you need to shut the car door behind you. You'd shove it closed with your butt, shooting your hips back to make contact. That's the same motion you're looking for in the hinge.
Another way to practice it is standing in front of a bench, with the backs of your legs lightly touching it, and hinging your hips back until you feel the bench again. Staying in contact with it the whole time keeps you honest about the pattern.
Once you've got the hinge down, you're ready to bring that same movement into the actual deadlift.
The Bench Press
The bench press usually isn't a mastering-the-pattern problem the way the squat and deadlift can be. It's more often a weight problem, meaning the empty bar itself might already be more than you can handle cleanly at first. If that's the case, spend some time building strength with dumbbells before moving to the barbell version. For most people, though, you can go straight to the bar and start practicing there.
One thing to keep in mind with the bench press: you actually want a slight arch in your lower back. Dig your heels in, bring your feet back toward you, keep your butt in contact with the bench, and screw your feet into the ground like you're trying to twist them into the floor. Your legs aren't doing much of the visible work here, but you still want to think about pushing through them.
Remember the intramuscular and intermuscular coordination we talked about earlier? This is where it shows up again. You want your whole body firing together, legs included, to help drive that bar up off your chest. Getting everything working as a team matters here just as much as it did with the squat and deadlift.
How to Program Them
As you're getting started, the goal is to get better at these lifts, and the way to get better at anything is to practice it often. While you're still in that learning phase, you can practice these lifts multiple times per week. The weight isn't heavy enough yet to cause the same fatigue, and it won't tax your central nervous system the same way as it will once you get stronger.
As you get more experienced and the weights start getting genuinely heavy, you'll notice these lifts become a lot more taxing on your body. Once you're there, it's better to save true heavy squatting and deadlifting for once a week each. You can still practice the movement a second time that week, just with lighter weight, some pauses, or a different variation, rather than pushing heavy again. You also generally don't want to squat heavy and deadlift heavy on the same day.
I'd also keep your program fairly structured during this time. Don't switch things up every week. Stick with the same lifts and setup for four to six weeks, maybe even longer if you're newer to this.
For reps, 3 to 6 is a good range to live in. Lower reps with higher weight is generally the best way to improve strength, since it works that intramuscular and intermuscular coordination we talked about earlier and really gets your central nervous system firing.
The bench press is the exception here. It's less taxing overall, so you can usually train it heavy multiple days a week without running into the same fatigue issues.
Pair It With Recomping, Not Cutting
Everything up to this point has been about training. This part is about how you eat alongside it, because the two work together.
If you're significantly overweight, you'll likely need an actual cut at some point. But you can still make a ton of progress before you jump straight to "eat less, get smaller." For most women, that's actually a better place to begin.
What Recomping Actually Means
Recomping means eating around maintenance while you train hard, letting your training do the work instead of a deficit doing it for you.
The result is you build muscle and lose fat at the same time, without the mental toll that comes with a strict cut.
If you want the full breakdown of how to actually set this up, from training volume to protein targets to how to know it's working, I've got a complete guide to body recomposition that walks through the whole thing.
Why the Mindset Matters
If you're expecting the scale to drop every single week, a week where it doesn't feels like failure, even if you've stayed just as consistent as always.
If you're not expecting the scale to move at all, a small drop feels like a win instead of a letdown. Same result on the scale, completely different experience of getting there.
And honestly, who wouldn't want this? You get to eat more instead of starving yourself, and you still see results. You get to stop obsessing over the scale, stop worrying about every little thing, because it's just not taking up space in your head the same way anymore.
The results come in the background while you're focused on getting stronger in the gym. You're not tracking every pound. You're just showing up, lifting, and you don't even realize your body is changing, until you catch yourself in the mirror and go, "damn, girl," out loud, to an empty bathroom.
My Own Experience With This
I did this in my first year of serious lifting. I decided to focus on getting stronger instead of losing weight, partly because I wanted to boost my metabolism so I could eventually eat more.
I still had baby weight that hadn't budged in a long time. Over that year, without trying to lose weight at all, I lost 10 pounds while also building muscle at the same time. That means I likely lost 15 pounds of fat or more, all while eating enough to actually fuel my training.
It's Not Just for Beginners
There used to be a belief that recomping only worked for beginners, and that once you'd been training for a while, you had to pick a lane: cut or bulk. Newer research pushes back on that. Recomping is achievable even for people who've been training for years.
Tying It Back Together
This connects directly to the mentality shift from earlier. Powerlifting-style training plus recomping means you're building the entire time, not shrinking. You're not chasing a smaller version of yourself. You're chasing a stronger one.
That combination, training hard and eating to support it, is genuinely where I think every woman should start.
Conclusion
Powerlifting-style training will change your entire mentality around exercise. Instead of focusing on the number on the scale, you're focused on performance and adding weight to the bar.
That shift is what keeps you consistent, and consistency is what actually gets you the progress and results you're after.
You don't need to start heavy. You don't need perfect form on day one. You just need to start.
If you want a program that's already built around exactly this approach, grab my free 6-week Strength and Hypertrophy Program. It'll get you started with the big three lifts, the right rep ranges, and a structure you can actually stick with.
Want a proven program to get started?
If you like structured training with clear progression (and no fluff), I put together a Free 6-week hypertrophy & strength program you can grab below.
FAQ
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Whatever weight you can lift with good form right now is your starting point. If that's the empty barbell, that's the empty barbell. The goal is to start and add weight gradually through progressive overload.
If you are adding weight and getting better at the movements, then you are making progress and seeing benefits.
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No, and in fact, it can help prevent back injuries and help with chronic back pain. A stronger back is a more resilient back.
People run into trouble if they start ego lifting or lifting more than they can handle.
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Start with an easier variation to build the pattern first: a goblet squat, light Romanian deadlifts to master the hinge, or dumbbells before the barbell for the bench. Focus on the movement before you focus on the weight.
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While you're still learning the movements, you can practice each lift multiple times a week since the weight isn't heavy enough yet to cause much fatigue. Once the weights get genuinely heavy, it's better to save true heavy squatting and deadlifting for once a week each, though the bench press can usually still be trained heavy multiple times a week.
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Not often. Stick with the same lifts and setup for four to six weeks, maybe longer if you're newer to training, so you can actually see progress instead of resetting the clock every time you switch exercises.
And even when you do change it up, I would keep the bench, squat, and deadlift in your program so you can continue to practice them.
