Women need to exercise only half as much as men to reach the same level of health, a new study from the US has revealed.
The study compared the amount of aerobic exercise men and women needed to lower their risk of dying, compared to their inactive counterparts.
The results found that men who exercised five hours each week had an 18 per cent lower risk of dying compared to inactive men, while women needed only 140 minutes (2 hours and 20 minutes) of weekly exercise to see a similar benefit.
For the women who exercised, the risk of death was 24 per cent lower among those who got about five hours of movement per week.
When it came to muscle-strengthening exercises, such as weight training, the results were similar.
For women, just one weekly strength-training session was linked to just as much health and longevity benefits as three weekly workouts for men.
The study’s co-author Dr. Martha Gulati, said the latest findings will bring good news for women who struggle to exercise.
“For me, the news to women is: a little goes a long way,” Gulati told TIME.
According to Gulati, who is the director of preventive cardiology at Cedars-Sinai in Los Angeles, women generally have less muscle mass than men, so “if they do the same amount of strengthening exercises, they may have greater benefits with smaller doses just based on the fact that they don’t have as much to begin with.”
In a separate statement, Gulati said “Women have historically and statistically lagged behind men in engaging in meaningful exercise.”
“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.”
Gulati and her colleagues analysed data from 412,413 US adults using the National Health Interview Survey database between 1997 to 2019, which provided self-reported data on leisure-time physical activity and compared those data with death records. Fifty-five per cent of the participants were female.
As they looked for patterns in preexisting data, they could not prove cause and effect, so it’s feasible that exercise alone did not extend people’s lives. However, the study was able to conclude that active people were healthier overall or had other lifestyle habits that increased longevity.
“For all adults engaging in any regular physical activity, compared to being inactive, mortality risk was expectedly lower,” said Dr Susan Cheng, a senior author of the study.
“Intriguingly, though, mortality risk was reduced by 24 per cent in women and 15 per cent in men.”
Gulati added that “women are not just small men”, adding the lack of historic research which accounted for sex-based differences.
“For years, we’ve used men as the standard,” Gulati said.
In Australia, the federal guidelines for physical activity set out by the Department of Health and Aged Care recommends between 2 to 5 hours of moderate intensity physical activity each week, and 1.25 to 2.5 hours of vigorous intensity physical exercise.
Last year, exercise physiologist Dr Angelo Sabag wrote that dedicating half an hour to exercise each day markedly lowers the risk of various conditions, including diabetes, fatty liver disease, heart disease, stroke, and certain cancers.
“For those who use public transport for their daily commute, simply disembarking a stop or station earlier can easily fulfill this exercise goal,” Dr Sabag said.
“Our pitch should be the same to men and women: something is better than nothing,” Galati added. “Sit less and move more.”
Professor Christine M. Albert, chair of the Department of Cardiology in the Smidt Heart Institute, said the study itself is an important milestone in health research for women.
“I am hopeful that this pioneering research will motivate women who are not currently engaged in regular physical activity to understand that they are in a position to gain tremendous benefit for each increment of regular exercise they are able to invest in their longer-term health,” she said.