Women experience greater benefits than men from the same amount of regular exercise, research suggests, when it comes to avoiding an early grave.
According to the NHSmen and women aged 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 a week.
However, studies have shown that girls and women tend to do this less physical activity than boys and men.
Now research suggests that men and women do not get the same gains from the same levels of physical activity.
“Our study does not suggest that women should exercise less, but rather encourages women who may not be getting enough exercise for various reasons that even relatively small amounts of exercise can have significant benefits,” said co-author Dr Hongwei Ji . from the study of 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 problems, who were 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, which included questions about exercise.
The results show that a higher percentage of men undertook regular physical activity and strengthening exercises 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. By contrast, men needed 300 minutes of such exercise per week for a similar gain.
The reduction in risk increased with time spent exercising for men and women, up to about 300 minutes of moderate activity per week – when it plateaued. At this level, women had a 24% lower risk of premature death from any cause compared to inactive.
“The 300-minute threshold is where we observed the greatest benefits, but statistically significant gender differences emerge with even smaller doses,” Ji said.
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However, the team cautions the study was based on self-reported exercise, and did not include physical activity related to household activities.
Prof Emmanuel Stamatakis, from the University of Sydney, who was not involved in the work, said the research was well carried out.
“Although women appear to engage in less leisure-time exercise, their mortality risk is more strongly reduced for any given weekly amount or frequency of exercise,” he said. “This is not very surprising, since such analyzes cannot take into account that the physical effort exerted by women for a given physical task is higher than in men.”
Stamatakis added that it is likely that women’s training sessions reflect higher relative loads than for men, while several properties of skeletal muscle differ between men and women, possibly explaining the different responses to the same absolute doses of exercise.
Dr. Susan Cheng, co-author of the research from the Smidt Heart Institute at Cedars-Sinai, said the study showed that when it comes to living longer and healthier, different types of investments are linked to different types of gains for men and women.
“We hope that understanding this one concept may help some women who may feel too busy or too intimidated to start a new exercise routine and know that they don’t need to compare how much or how hard they work to men or with anyone else for that matter,” she said. “They can be on their own path to success and every bit of progress will count.”
