Women Who Engage in Physical Activity Have a 9% Lower Risk of Dying Than Men Even Without Working as Hard at the Gym

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Women Who Engage in Physical Activity Have a 9% Lower Risk of Dying Than Men Even Without Working as Hard at the Gym

Women and men are designed and programmed differently. Between the two, one gender can reap long-term health benefits at the gym without working as hard as the other.

Women Don't Need To Work As Hard As Men At The Gym

A new study followed 400,000 adults in the United States after tracking their physical activities. The researchers found that women gain longer-term health benefits from physical activities than men.

Researchers at the Schmidt Heart Institute in California oversaw the study, which monitored participant health data from 1997 to 2019 and compared the degree of physical exercise with illness-related deaths. Participants in the National Health Interview Survey, which forms the basis of this study, are asked to categorize their sex as male or female.

Researchers discovered that compared to male participants, female individuals engaged in much less weekly physical activity, such as brisk walking or cycling. They also engaged in less core and weight exercise.

However, compared to those who did not exercise, women who engaged in at least moderate physical activity per week saw a 24% reduction in their chance of dying from any cause. Frequent physical activity was associated with a mere 15% decrease in all-cause mortality among males. Therefore, women have a nine percent lower risk of dying than men even without working as hard as them at the gym.

The results indicate that different amounts of regular cardio and muscular building are needed by men and women to fully benefit from exercise's ability to extend life.

Additionally, the male participants achieved their maximum survival benefit after five hours of cardio. The same survival effects were achieved for female participants with little more than two hours per week of moderate-to-intense exercise.

After three weekly sessions of weightlifting or core body exercises, men experienced the most significant survival gain. On the other hand, women made the same progress with just one weekly session.

Although the exact cause of these sex disparities is unknown, researchers offer some theories. Less lean body mass limits blood vessels' normal ability to expand when needed. Therefore, women can teach their cardiovascular system to work harder by engaging in physical exercise.

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Are Men Better Than Women in Navigation?

Researchers from the University of Illinois and other institutions compared the "home range size and spatial ability" of 21 distinct animals, including humans, between the sexes to see if evolution affects how the two sexes navigate.

Among the animals included were the European rabbit, rat, chimps, Asian small-clawed otter, diablito poison frog, and humans. The data supporting sex differences was considered to be weak by the researchers.

According to the authors, men did not evolve to become better navigators. Rather, they came to the conclusion that biological factors like life experience, rather than evolution, could be responsible for men's greater navigational abilities. The authors stress that additional research is necessary to investigate this notion fully.

In a separate survey, however, 48% of male respondents felt they were better drivers than women, with 25% of women believing they were.

However, a lot of women readily agree that men are superior drivers. Men and women agree, for the most part, that men make better drivers.