Jennifer Aniston can sum up her old workout routine in three words: “cardio, cardio, cardio.”
“Treadmill, elliptical, bike. Treadmill, elliptical, bike,” she says. “Rinse and repeat.”
Weights were always part of it, but her routine primarily tacked on just five to 10 minutes of lifting to the end of a workout, and usually only five to eight pounds dumbbells.
It was all a reflection of the “messaging” at the time, she says, that weights will make you bulky.
“You hear bulk, and you kind of run for the hills if you’re a woman, a young girl,” she says. “You want to be lean, lean, lean. And the thought of bulk and weight makes you go, ‘It’ll get big, big, big,’ and you just go, ‘No, no, no.’”
Now, speaking to TODAY.com about her new 30-day strength training program with boutique fitness studio Pvolve, she says, “if only I’d listened” to those calls for people, women especially, to preserve their bone density through weight lifting.
She’s not alone. Pvolve released a movement longevity report that found that 78% of respondents (1,000 women over age 40) to an online survey know weight lifting is important. But 60% don’t do it in a typical week. The reasons range from not knowing where to start (27%), fears of injury (20%) and feeling intimidated by weights (9%), per the report.
Aniston, 57, says she really started to implement strength training into her routine through Pvolve. She started using the fitness method, which offers at-home, on demand workouts, in 2021 as a “secret streamer” after an injury, before joining Pvolve as a public partner in 2023. She says she also got injured after trying boxing and CrossFit.
“To each their own, but I just would find myself injured quite a lot,” she says. “And granted, I’m a little klutzy.”
“But Pvolve has just sort of changed all that,” she adds.
It’s also changed her understanding of what defines a successful workout. She says when her routine was entirely cardio-focused, if she wasn’t drenched in sweat and “heaving” by the end, it didn’t feel like progress. Once she started incorporating weights in her entire workouts, she prioritized consistency, gradual weight increases and listening to her body.
“You feel sore, but it’s never sore to the point where you can’t walk the next day … well, sometimes, but in a good way,” she says. “I’ve had workouts where I really can’t walk or walking up a step or two or having to sit down was just agony. That feels like you worked something too hard.”
Aniston’s strength training approach is to add weights to the “everyday” movements she already did with Pvolve. The moves are often compound, meaning they work multiple muscle groups at a time, and require balance. Her workouts get at the “little tiny micro muscles that are hiding underneath the big muscles,” she says.
Weight lifting is also known to protect bone density, or how porous bones are, which deteriorates with age. Dr. Ian Smith told TODAY.com the best time to build up bone density is in your 20s, when bone mass is at its peak. That way, you have more you can stand to lose as you age. But you can still preserve what remains and slow future loss at any age through weight-bearing exercises, which puts muscle and bone under strain to promote growth.
“I wish we had listened to this when we were told, but we didn’t. … Bone density is something we talk about now a lot,” Aniston says.
“My parents were lucky enough to live quite long in life, but they were not mobile,” she adds. “This is all about longevity, and growing old is in all of our cards, so how do we do that with as much strength and mobility so we can thrive?”
For Aniston, she takes it workout by workout.
“Consistency is everything, and then you just feel stronger and you realize, you know what, I can go up to a 10-pounder,’” she says.
But listening to her body is paramount, she says.
“Give yourself a day off if you don’t want to work out … Don’t dread it,” she says. “Just check in and just say, you know what, I’ll start, and if I don’t feel great after five minutes, and I still feel like s—, then I just don’t work out.”
“Or, I just go, ‘You know how great you’re going to feel when you’re done?’ You’re going to feel so amazing,” she says. “You can do anything for 40 minutes, come on.”