Women who partake in moderate to vigorous exercise can get the same health benefits as men doing the same exercise, but in only half the time.
While men undertaking physical activity such as brisk bike riding for about five hours a week gain maximal reduction of mortality risk, women reached the same mortality risk reduction at 2.5 hours.
Furthermore, if women continued moderate to vigorous physical activity for more than 2.5 hours a week, they continued to lower their risk until that reached the five-hour level.
The remarkable findings are in a new study by the Smidt Heart Institute in Los Angeles.
Investigators analysed data from 412,413 U.S. adults utilizing the National Health Interview Survey database. Participants between the time frame of 1997 to 2019—55% of whom were female—provided survey data on leisure-time physical activity.
Investigators examined gender-specific outcomes in relation to frequency, duration, intensity and type of physical activity.
“For all adults engaging in any regular physical activity, compared to being inactive, mortality risk was expectedly lower,” said Susan Cheng, MD, MPH, the Erika J. Glazer Chair in Women’s Cardiovascular Health and Population Science, director of the Institute for Research on Healthy Aging in the Department of Cardiology in the Smidt Heart Institute, and senior author of the study.
“Intriguingly, though, mortality risk was reduced by 24% in women and 15% in men.”
The study also established that when it came to muscle-strengthening activity, such as weightlifting or core body exercises, men reached their peak benefit from doing three sessions per week and women gained the same amount of benefit from about one session per week.
“Women have historically and statistically lagged behind men in engaging in meaningful exercise,” said Martha Gulati, MD, director of Preventive Cardiology in the Department of Cardiology in the Smidt Heart Institute at Cedars-Sinai, the Anita Dann Friedman Chair in Women's Cardiovascular Medicine and Research and co-lead author of the study.
“The beauty of this study is learning that women can get more out of each minute of moderate to vigorous activity than men do. It’s an incentivising notion that we hope women will take to heart.”
The study concluded that the findings could motivate efforts to close the “gender gap” by encouraging especially women to engage in any regular leisure-time physical activity.
"Our findings extend from a continually growing body of concordant evidence from physiology and clinical studies on sexual dimorphism in exercise capacity and associated outcomes.
“Taken together, the results from the current study combined with those of prior investigations suggest that PA-related risk assessments and recommendations could benefit from sex-specific considerations; in turn, sex-specific guidance could serve to motivate increased PA engagement particularly among women who stand to gain substantial health benefits.
"Recognizing the limitations of a one- size-fits-all approach, increasing attention to sex differences in PA-related risks and benefits could augment precision medicine efforts to improve health outcomes for all."
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