Women benefit more than men from the same amount of regular exercise – studying

Women experience greater benefits than men from the same amount of regular exercise, research shows when it comes to avoiding an early grave.

According to the NSMen and women ages 19 to 64 should get at least 150 minutes of moderate exercise, or 75 minutes of vigorous exercise per week, with muscle-strengthening activities at least twice per week.

However, research has shown that girls and women are generally less physically active than boys and men.

Research now shows that men and women do not get the same benefits from the same levels of physical activity.

“Our research does not suggest that women should exercise less, but encourages women who may not be getting enough exercise for various reasons that even relatively small amounts of exercise can provide significant benefits,” said study co-author Dr. Hongwei Ji the Affiliated Hospital of Qingdao University.

Writing in the Journal of the American College of CardiologyJi and colleagues report how they studied 412,413 participants without underlying health conditions, recruited from 1997 to 2017. By the end of December 2019, 39,935 had died, of which 11,670 were cardiovascular deaths.

During the study, participants took part in health surveys, including questions about exercise.

The results show that a greater proportion of men engaged in regular exercise and strength training than women.

Although exercise was associated with a reduced risk of premature death for men and women – including from cardiovascular events – the benefits were greater for the latter.

Among other things, the team found that 140 minutes of moderate exercise per week reduced women’s risk of premature death from any cause by 18% compared to being inactive. Men, on the other hand, needed 300 minutes of such exercise per week for similar gains.

The reduction in risk increased with the time men and women spent exercising, up to around 300 minutes of moderate activity per week – after which the reduction tapered off. At this level, women had a 24% lower risk of premature death from any cause, compared to women who were inactive.

“The 300-minute threshold is where we observed the greatest benefits, but statistically significant gender differences emerge at even smaller doses,” Ji said.

However, the team cautions that the study is based on self-reported exercise and does not include physical activity related to household activities.

Professor Emmanuel Stamatakis from the University of Sydney, who was not involved in the work, said the research was well conducted.

“Although women appear to exercise less in their leisure time, their mortality risk is reduced more for a given weekly amount or frequency of exercise,” he said. “This is not very surprising, given that such analyzes cannot take into account that women’s physical exertion for a given physical task is higher than that of men.”

Stamatakis added that women’s training sessions likely reflected higher relative loads than men’s, while several skeletal muscle properties differed between men and women, which could potentially explain the different responses to the same absolute training doses.

Dr. Susan Cheng, co-author of the study from the Smidt Heart Institute at Cedars-Sinai, said the research shows that when it comes to living longer, healthier lives, different types of investments are linked to different types of gains for men and women.

“We hope that understanding this one concept might help some women who feel too busy or intimidated to take on a new exercise routine and know that they don’t have to compare how much or how hard they work with men or with men. someone else for that matter,†she said. “They can follow their own path to success and every bit of progress will count.”