Women see greater benefits from exercise, study finds

A new study involving more than 400,000 people found women tend to see greater benefits from aerobic exercise compared to men.

Specifically, when it comes to heart health and overall risk for death.

“We found out that not only males and females require different dose of exercise to benefit, females, or self-identified females, what happens is for the same dose of exercise, they benefit way more,” said Dr. Wael Jaber, cardiology specialist for Cleveland Clinic. “And males, after a certain number of minutes of exercise per week, almost 110 minutes, they plateau. So, they don’t benefit more from the exercise.”

Dr. Jaber assisted in reviewing this research. He said another interesting finding is that while men plateau after 110 minutes of aerobic exercise, women continue to see benefits. It’s not just with aerobic exercise, but strength training too.

Key takeaways from study

Dr. Jaber said to start, the findings show that aerobic exercise guidelines should not be one-size-fits-all.

Another is that there is no specific exercise that’s best. Any movement is better than none at all.

Finally, he believes many communities need to become more walkable.

“Choose a community where you can be active, and push your community to actually create sidewalks, to create places where you can be active, and spontaneously. You don’t have to drive half an hour in the car to go to a park to walk 10 minutes,” he said. “So, this is the spontaneity of it. And to have a grocery store where you can walk to the grocery store, have a coffee shop where you can walk to the coffee shop, have a workplace where you can walk to your workplace, ideally.”

Dr. Jaber said more research needs to be done to better understand why women are likely to see greater health benefits with exercise. However, that doesn’t mean men need to change their workout habits.