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There’s a line between exercising and training, and it isn’t about how hard you go — it’s about programs, protein targets, and knowing what week you’re in. Eleven questions, about a minute, and a number out of 100.
Strength training.
How many times a week do you train?
Do you follow a program?
Rest days.
Where do you train?
Shoes.
Do you track your sessions?
What does this cost you in a year?
Protein.
Programming vocabulary.
Other people's training.
Answer every question to see your score.
0 still to go.
Where your score came from
Where you're taking it easier
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What the three scores measure
This splits into three, and they’re less connected than they look. Plenty of people train five times a week and have never followed a program.
The Training
Frequency, structure, and what kind of work you’re doing. Strength training carries the heaviest weight in this quiz deliberately, because the evidence for resistance work past forty is genuinely strong — bone density, muscle mass, and metabolic health all respond to it in ways cardio alone doesn’t touch. Rest days score well here too, which surprises people. Adaptation happens between sessions, not during them.
Kit & Setup
Where you train, what you wear, whether you log anything. Tracking is the one that matters most and gets skipped most — progressive overload only works if you know what last week’s number was. The rest is preference, though separate shoes for lifting and running is a real distinction rather than an affectation: running shoes are built to compress, which is the opposite of what you want underfoot when loaded.
Knowledge & Depth
Protein, programming vocabulary, and whether you notice what others are doing. Protein requirements genuinely rise with age, and they rise further alongside resistance training — it’s the nutritional lever that determines whether the work translates into anything.
The honest caveat
A high score measures engagement, not health. The curve here flattens much earlier than the fitness industry suggests: the difference between doing nothing and training twice a week is enormous, and the difference between twice a week and six times is comparatively modest. Someone scoring in the fifties with two solid strength sessions, decent protein and consistent sleep is getting the large majority of what’s available.
The people at the top of this scale mostly know that. They’re there because they enjoy it, which is the same reason anyone does anything at that volume — and enjoyment is a perfectly good reason. It’s just not the same thing as necessity.
If you change one thing
Add resistance work, or make it heavier. It’s the single highest-return change available to most women over forty, and almost none of the reasons are cosmetic. Two sessions a week, tracked so you can see the numbers move, is enough to do most of the job.
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