2024-02-19 19:00:00
Health women’s fitness
The fairy tale of hard training
Status: 19.02.2024 | Reading time: 3 minutes
Women only need to train half as much as men to achieve comparable effects
Quelle: Getty Images/Westend61
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The myth has persisted for years: women have to exercise longer and harder to achieve similar training effects as men. That seems to be a mistake, as a recent study shows – at least when it comes to health.
Women have to do significantly less exercise to get the same health benefits as men. A current study comes to this surprising result. For this purpose, data from more than 400,000 people from 1997 to 2019 were evaluated.
Men achieved a maximum reduction in the risk of death when they exercised for around 300 minutes per week. Women only had to spend 140 minutes to achieve this goal, as a team of US and Chinese researchers now report in the specialist magazine „Journal of the American College of Cardiology“ writes.
The team led by Martha Gulati from Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, Los Angeles, and Hongwei Ji from Tsinghua University, Beijing, wanted to know what effects exercise has on health. To do this, Gulati and her colleagues used a nationwide database, the “National Health Interview Survey”. The 412,413 adults selected, 55 percent of whom were women, provided information about the type and extent of their sporting activity per week in a questionnaire survey.
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During the observation period of more than 20 years, almost 40,000 of the test subjects died, including 11,670 from cardiovascular diseases. The researchers now determined to what extent the risk of death had decreased through exercise.
Regular sporting activity in leisure time reduced this risk by an average of 15 percent for men and 24 percent for women – in each case compared to people who did not do any sport.
With regard to cardiovascular diseases, the reduction through exercise was 14 percent in men and even 36 percent in women. The difference was similarly large when it came to sporting activities that strengthen muscles: regular strength training reduced the risk of death from cardiovascular disease by 11 percent in men and by 30 percent in women.
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When men exercised very intensively for 110 minutes per week, their risk of death fell by 19 percent. Women were able to achieve this value after just 57 minutes of intensive training. “The beauty of this study is that women can get more out of every minute of moderate to vigorous activity than men,” emphasizes Gulati. She and her team hope that the study results will encourage more women to be physically active, as the time required to have a positive health effect is not particularly great.
For Kuno Hottenrott from the Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg, the result is no surprise. “I have been advocating for a long time that the sports recommendations in health guidelines should be differentiated more according to gender and age,” says the sports scientist.
In 2008 he had already developed a formula for calculating the ideal pulse rate for endurance sports that took differences between women and men into account. On average, women have significantly lower muscle mass, a lower metabolic rate, smaller body dimensions and a lower blood volume than men, explains Hottenrott.
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