Women need not spend as much time as men to stay physically fit and healthy.
A new study by the Schmidt Heart Institute suggests women may experience greater long-term health benefits from regular physical activity compared to men, even with less exercise.
The long-term study, involving over 400,000 adults in the US, tracked participants' health data for over two decades, comparing physical activity levels with mortality rates.
The research revealed that women who engaged in some form of physical activity each week, regardless of intensity or duration, experienced a significant reduction in all-cause mortality risk (up to 24%) compared to inactive women. However, for men, achieving the same reduction required a higher level of activity.
The study suggests that men and women may require different levels of physical activity to experience the full health benefits of exercise. While male participants saw the greatest survival benefit after five hours of weekly cardio, women achieved similar results with just over two hours of moderate-to-vigorous cardio.
The authors of the latest study write, "While the study highlights potential sex-based differences in exercise benefits, further research is needed to understand the underlying biological factors and establish tailored exercise recommendations for different populations."
"In fact, physiology studies have demonstrated that female individuals exhibit greater vascular conductance and blood flow during exercise, with female individuals having a higher density of capillaries per unit of skeletal muscle when compared with male individuals. Accordingly, although female individuals have generally lower muscle strength at baseline, when both male and female individuals undergo strength training, female individuals experience greater relative improvements in strength, which is a stronger predictor of mortality than muscle mass," the researchers wrote.