February 20, 2024 – Working out advantages us all – but women may profit more from grabbing a pair of dumbbells or going for a sweaty walk than their male counterparts.
That's in accordance with a serious recent study that found that girls who spend the identical period of time on a treadmill, playing pickleball or simply taking a brisk walk reap more life-saving advantages Exercise as men. The results suggest that the country's current uniform exercise recommendations may higher reflect the advantages of exercise using gender-specific guidelines.
The studypublished on Monday within the Journal of the American College of Cardiology, found that exercise can reduce the danger of early death in women by as much as 24%, while men who exercised for a similar period of time only reduced their risk by 15%.
The risk reductions were similar when researchers looked only at deaths from problems with the center or blood vessels, which include the nation's leading causes of death resembling heart disease and stroke. Again, the advantages of exercise were greater for ladies than for men: Regular exercise reduced the danger of a fatal heart attack, stroke, or other cardiac event by 36% in women, but only 14% in men.
“There are so many busy women who just have a lot on their plate. They take care of the home, they may have a job outside the home, they may have children, and they may be very, very busy. This study exonerates them,” said study lead writer Susan Cheng, director of the Institute for Healthy Aging Research at Cedars Sinai in Los Angeles. “You don't have to feel guilty about not exercising three to five times a week, because it turns out you can actually do less.”
Cheng and her colleagues found that girls who exercised for 140 minutes per week reduced their risk of early death by 18%, while men needed to exercise for 300 minutes – greater than double – to realize the identical 18% risk reduction. to be experienced by individuals who were less physically lively.
But investing more time could lead on to greater protective advantages for ladies, Cheng said.
Benefits varied by intensity and weekly minutes of physical activity, but women at all times experienced greater protection than men, whatever the type, intensity, or duration of exercise:
- The maximum profit for ladies of moderate exercise resembling brisk walking or gardening was 300 minutes per week, leading to a 24% reduced risk of early death.
- Intense exercise resembling running or swimming laps reduced men's risk of early death by 19% based on 110 minutes per week, while women reduced their risk by 19% with 57 weekly minutes (and just 13 additional intense minutes brought protection to 24% ). ).
- Regular muscle constructing training also reduced the danger of early death more in women than in men.
The researchers reached their conclusions after analyzing survey data from 1997 to 2017 collected from greater than 400,000 individuals who self-reported their recreational physical activity levels. About 55% of survey participants were women.
The average age of the people within the study was 44 years (their ages ranged from 18 to 85). Researchers then linked people within the surveys to a national database of deceased people and analyzed their causes of death in relation to their reported exercise habits.
People who had already been diagnosed with heart disease or who had previously suffered a heart attack or stroke were excluded from the study. Individuals with emphysema, chronic bronchitis, or cancer were also excluded.
The results lack certainty since the exercise was self-reported in a survey and never confirmed by data from people wearing fitness tracking devices, Dr. Emily Kraus, a physical medicine and rehabilitation specialist and assistant professor at Stanford Medicine in California. She was not involved within the study.
Nevertheless, Kraus praised the research since it helped draw attention to the gaps in scientific knowledge about gender differences in sports.
“I was excited to see a study that focused on gender differences, but after reading it I have more questions than answers, in part simply due to the nature of this type of study. “It provides some comprehensive, high-level, population-based information that is important to guide us in future research as well as potential policy or policy changes,” said Kraus, who directs Stanford’s FASTR program, a part of an initiative Closing the gender gap in sports science research.
“It was interesting for me to learn more about what they call their gender gap, which is the difference in physical activity and exercise, with men exercising more than women,” she said.
It is a spot that begins in childhood and adolescence. National guidelines require that children ages 6 and older get 60 minutes of physical activity per day, but only 15% of women ages 6 to 17 and 31% of boys met the factors in 2019, a study found CDC report.
In this latest study, 33% of ladies reported exercising 150 minutes or more per week, while 43% of men reported this. (National adult guidelines recommend 150 minutes of weekly physical activity for adults, no matter gender.)
“Is it possible that we simply have more sports activities for boys than for girls? Historically, yes, but things are changing and things are improving. But is it also possible,” Cheng said, “that the physiology of women and men, biologically speaking, tends to engage in different levels of physical activity?”
Both Cheng and Kraus said these latest findings make sense because known differences between men and ladies – resembling heart size or the blood's ability to hold oxygen – can dramatically affect physical performance. Cheng says her team's findings suggest fundamental sex differences in cardiovascular aging.
“Should we really put everyone on the same scale in terms of the amount of time you run, the speed at which you run, the number of push-ups you do, the number of sit-ups you do, should they all be measured the same?” Cheng said, mentioning That another countries like Canada and European nations have already got gender-specific fitness goals.
Another sign of age differences between men and ladies was a preliminary evaluation by Cheng's team that showed older menopausal women didn't get quite as many protective advantages from exercise as young women. Essentially, the gap between men and ladies in the advantages of exercise narrows as we age.
Both Cheng and Kraus said the goal is to supply people personalized exercise recipes. Kraus said she expects these recipes to vary throughout an individual's life.
“Think about all the different life stages that women experience that men don't,” Kraus said, “from the start of a menstrual cycle through pregnancy to perimenopause, and how should those recommendations change to address those really physiological and hormonal differences.” “take into account?” for a lady who trains?”
In one comment Published alongside the study, Wael Jaber, MD, and Erika Hutt, MD, each of the Cleveland Clinic, wrote that the outcomes of this latest study could motivate women to exercise.
“This may encourage physically inactive women to engage in more physical activity in their free time by providing a more achievable goal for those women who believe that time is a barrier to exercise,” Jaber and Hutt write. “In addition, it could motivate physically active women to exercise more by significantly reducing all-cause and cardiovascular mortality by up to 24%.”