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Everyone on Instagram — and walking down the sidewalk or around the playground — seems to be wearing a weighted vest. Everyone but me.

Forbes reported that the weighted vest market generated $205 million in 2024, and that number is expected to be even higher for 2025. So it’s not all in my head: They’re big business, and American women are happily buying in. A political pollster recently found that 1 in 6 American women has one. 

That has made me feel a little left out and paranoid. Was I doing a major disservice to my health by not strapping [checks notes] three to 30 pounds to my back to walk around my neighborhood? 

Cue the expert

So I reached out to Joan Grossman, PhD, a registered dietitian/nutritionist who is also an associate professor of health and human performance at the University of Scranton. Her research focuses on how various forms of exercise impact post-menopausal body composition and performance. 

Grossman said that when it comes to health and longevity, the most important thing is daily body resistance training, or strength training. Such training — using resistance to build muscle strength — is critical for bone health, heart health and metabolic health; research has found that women who engage in regular strength training live longer. It helps preserve the lean muscle mass that’s important for health but decreases with age. 

But don’t get daunted: What Grossman has replicated in her research multiple times over is that 15 minutes a day of strength training is all it takes to elicit real body composition change. This most likely will look like basic exercises that you’re already familiar with: squats, lunges, push-ups and bicep curls are all forms of strength training.

Enter the current chatter about weighted vests, often touted as a way for women to get that strength training they need to protect their bone health and build lean muscle mass. But there’s actually really limited research on weighted vests themselves, especially on whether they provide strength training benefits the same way that lifting weights or engaging in even body weight exercises does. 

What’s known so far is that there seem to be cardiovascular benefits from walking with a weighted vest. But a small study done by Thai researchers found no difference in bone health between those who walked with weighted vests and those who walked without. 

That’s probably because the best exercises for bone density and lean muscle mass are those that involve executing a full range of body motion while utilizing significant resistance. (Think: a series of lunges while holding hand weights.)

“You have to tug on those muscles in order for the muscles to require that metabolic demand,” Grossman said. “And when I say tug on them, I mean you have to use them. It takes work.”

And the trick is to keep using them in this way, even as you continue to age. (Yes, Grossman said — you can definitely be 75 and doing a full body squat. And the best way to ensure that’s possible then? Start practicing now.)

So, could a weighted vest help with this? Maybe, but the research is far from definitive. And should you buy a weighted vest? Sure, if you want to. But do you need to? Not necessarily. 

Grossman also advises some caution: There’s also a risk of injury with weighted vests — whether from strain or loss of balance — especially if people are wearing them while doing other forms of resistance training at a gym with little experience. 

So why are weighted vests everywhere? 

I wanted to unpack what to make of their overwhelming popularity. I called Natalia Mehlman Petrzela, a historian, professor at The New School and the author of “Fit Nation: The Gains and Pains of America’s Exercise Obsession.” She’s a woman in her 40s and so she also sees weighted vests all around her. And when she sees them, she thinks about the ThighMaster. 

Fitness in the United States “is primarily a marketplace, and there is always a new product being marketed,” she said. Weighted vests are just the latest magic cure for all that ails you as you age — weight gain! loss of bone density! loss of muscle tone! 

What feels new, though, is that the product also promises to maximize your productivity. “The fact that a weighted vest is a device that you can just put on when you’re just walking around suggests that just walking around isn’t good enough, that you actually should be optimizing that time on your feet to also be working out at the same time,” she said. 

The immense popularity of weighted vests is also a sign of a change in how society sees middle-aged women.

“There’s this thorny thing happening where there is this shift from seeing women past a certain age as invisible and unattractive and unworthy of any sort of attention to now seeing them as women who can be sexually attractive and have desires and deserve to feel good,” Mehlman Petrzela said. “I think the double-edged sword of that is that there’s this constant pressure to work on yourself and that now, when you’re 55, you actually still have a lot of pressure to look hot and work out all the time and feel great and be working on yourself and not let yourself go — that pressure didn’t exist in, say, 1960 or even 1990.” 

It’s a whole other weight to carry. 

Mehlman Petrzela said that when she sees women walking in her neighborhood wearing weighted vests, she commends them on their commitment to caring for themselves and prioritizing health. But also:

“It feels a little bit like this Army of Women who are never allowed to stop working on their fitness, even when they’re going about their day. The idea or the reality that we women who are already carrying so much are now carrying an extra burden to do all of that can sometimes feel, well, a little much.”

Speaking of a little much …

In a few weeks, we’re going to be talking about something I have been hearing a lot about from my peers IRL: the dynamic of a mother going through perimenopause living in the same household as a daughter going through puberty and what so many hormones under one roof can look and feel like. (I have a middle schooler myself so … yes.)

Is this also you? Please write to me! I would love to speak with you for this upcoming edition about what you’re experiencing — and what you’re learning about yourself and your child in real time as you change, together. 

Correction: An earlier version of this article misstated the title of Natalia Mehlman Petrzela.