Study: Weight Lifting May Help Fight, Prevent Depression

Lifting weights might also lift moods, according to an important new review of dozens of studies about strength training and depression. It finds that resistance exercise often substantially reduces people’s gloom, no matter how melancholy they feel at first, or how often — or seldom — they actually get to the gym and lift.

[…]What they found was that resistance training consistently reduced the symptoms of depression, whether someone was formally depressed at the start of the study or not. In other words, if people began the study with depression, they usually felt better after taking up weight training. And if they started out with normal mental health, they ended the experiment with less chance of having become morose and sad than people who did not train.

Perhaps most interesting, the amount of weight training did not seem to matter. The benefits essentially were the same, whether people went to the gym twice a week or five times a week and whether they were completing lots of repetitions of each exercise or only a few.

The mental health impacts were similar, too, for men and women and for younger lifters (often college students) and people who were middle-aged or elderly.

And people did not need to pack on mass or might to reduce their depression. More strength after the experiment did not correlate with less depression, the researchers found.

All that mattered was showing up and completing the workouts.