This summer, toned arms became the new status symbol—and a near-impossible to achieve beauty standard.
From Lauren Sánchez Bezos waving from a balcony in Venice to the sculpted biceps of an HR director seen canoodling at a Coldplay concert, toned arms have gone viral. Red carpets, Instagram feeds, and even Times Square billboards echo the theme: deltoids and triceps, proudly displayed. Serena Williams recently posted swimsuit photos showing off striated arms after promoting her more than 30-pound GLP-1 weight loss.
Between Hollywood’s decades-long obsession with thinness and the recent swings of the body-positivity movement, GLP-1s have ushered in a new era of lessness. Now comes the next layer: muscle.
It’s not just a vibe—it’s in the numbers. Women’s participation in weight training rose to 14% in 2024, up from 11% in 2019, according to new research from the Health and Fitness Association. Gyms from Crunch to Life Time are ripping out rows of cardio machines to make room for barbells—thanks to the ladies, who make up a growing proportion of the membership. Women are strapping on camo-colored weighted backpacks while walking their dogs, and upstart brands such as The Carry and Yvoty are coming out with sleeker versions to fit their frames. The booming $17 billion menopause industry now touts weightlifting as a shield against muscle loss and bone thinning.
“There’s been a shift in realizing that skinny, as you get older, as opposed to being strong, is detrimental,” says Joanna Strober, chief executive of Midi Health, a telehealth company serving more than 200,000 midlife women. “People are worried about their bones and looking at women who are skinny and hunched over and saying ‘that’s not what I want to be.’”
Arms, it turns out, may be the ultimate flex. They signal power, discipline, and a cultural shift underway.
Read more: Becoming a Bodybuilder at 50 Showed Me That Women Were Never Meant to be Thin
In his 2023 book Outlive, Peter Attia helped push muscle into the mainstream conversation about longevity, reframing strength not just as fitness, but as a tool for living longer. What had long been the province of geriatrics quickly morphed into something performative and hyper-masculine, with podcasters hyping testosterone injections, influencers displaying stacks of supplements, and billionaires interested in blood plasma exchanges as a way to live longer.
Lately, though, the idea has moved beyond the bio-bros. Lynn Jurich, who co-founded and led the solar-energy giant Sunrun, now runs a $10,000-a-year membership club in Silicon Valley called the Female Longevity Institute. The center employs a physician and a nurse practitioner who monitor women’s hormone levels, offers $2,000-a-session facial laser rejuvenation treatments, and a gym stocked with Rogue barbells and eucalyptus-scented towels. At the heart of the program: weightlifting.
“My peer group of senior vice presidents and CEOs who were entering late perimenopause—I saw them losing confidence at work, dropping out, going through divorces,” Jurich says. “A key goal of ours is to bring back feminine power.”
At the Lifted Method studio in East Hampton, NY, where 300 women cycle through weight-training classes each week, the clientele increasingly seeks what money can’t buy, owner Holly Rilinger says: muscle. “It’s this idea of ‘I can wear my strength as a symbol of hard work,’” she says. “Women are wanting stronger arms and looking more cut.”
For most of the past century, arms were portrayed to be thin—whether in the waifish 1990s or the booty-obsessed 2010s shaped by Hollywood. But social media has shifted the lens. A new wave of fitfluencers and gymfluencers who aren’t actors or singers now dominate millions of feeds, redefining beauty ideals through lifting weights, while promoting supplements and matching sets on the side.
Strength was once straightforward: You lifted weight, you got strong. “The thing about strength is it’s democratic,” says Dany Garcia, a former pro bodybuilder who serves as chief executive of the The Garcia Companies, a portfolio that includes fitness, sports and entertainment. But today, what’s being sold to women isn’t strength itself, she argues, but the illusion of it—muscle as a visual accessory, achieved by lowering body fat. “If you’re lean, of course your muscles will show,” Garcia says. “But that’s not the same thing as being strong.”
Nowhere is this contradiction more visible than in the arm, which has become a cultural billboard. Once ignored, it is suddenly freighted with meaning. Women’s sports are surging. Abortion rights have been stripped away. “When you recognize rights are taken away, something in us wants to kick ass,” says Garcia, who just launched a media company focused on female strength. Arms have become shorthand for discipline, control, and a woman’s capacity to fight back.
Read more: Weight Lifting May Help You Live Longer, Study Says
But some say the new ideal is less about power, and more about chasing perfection. “The key to beauty ideals is that if they’re too easily reached, they’re no longer ideals,” says Renee Engeln, a psychology professor at Northwestern University. “It’s not enough to be thin. Now you have to be thin and visibly muscular.” This isn’t empowerment, she argues. It’s the opposite: another way to ensure women never see their bodies as good enough.
Research by Missouri State University psychologist Brooke Whisenhunt found that Miss USA contestants from 1999 to 2013 became both thinner and more muscular, a combination that young women who were surveyed increasingly rated as most attractive. In experiments, when participants were forced to choose between a thin model and a thin model with added muscle, the muscular version won.
The appeal of muscularity comes with rules. Arms must be sculpted but not too large, powerful but still “feminine.” The line is policed by culture and reinforced by class. Achieving the perfect balance of muscle and thinness requires money, personal trainers, nutritionists, and time. “Never forget the most essential ingredient to achieving the ideal body, beyond genetics, is wealth,” Engeln says. “Wealth buys you access to healthy foods, the time and resources to make working out an unpaid part-time job.”
The muscular arm, then, is not just a marker of strength. It is a marker of privilege. And in that way, even as it signals power, it reinscribes control—defining women’s bodies by standards that only the few can ever meet.
Celebrity trainer Gunnar Peterson, who has worked with the Los Angeles Lakers and the Kardashians, says, “I don’t have women coming in saying ‘I want big arms.’ It’s ‘I want more definition in my arms.’” He charges roughly $350 an hour and recommends hiring a nutritionist.
“The common denominator of the women coming through my gym has always been ass, abs, arms,” says Peterson. “These days, it’s an arm thing.”
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