Longevity Briefs: Do Women Benefit More Than Men From Brief But Vigorous Exercise?

Longevity briefs provides a short summary of novel research in biology, medicine, or biotechnology that caught the attention of our researchers in Oxford, due to its potential to improve our health, wellbeing, and longevity.

The problem:

Research suggests that even very small amounts of physical activity are associated with significant health and life expectancy gains compared with not exercising at all. While guidelines typically recommend something like 150 minutes of moderate exercise per week, as little as 10 minutes of brisk walking per day may extend lifespan by nearly 2 years in comparison to not exercising at all.

In this study, researchers wanted to investigate how brief bouts of intense physical activity undertaken as part of regular daily life (think climbing stairs or hurrying to the bus stop) influenced health in people who weren’t undertaking any other type of exercise. Specifically, they were interested in how these short bouts of exercise influenced the risk of cardiovascular events like heart attack and stroke, and whether the effects of this type of exercise were different in men and women.

The discovery:

Researchers looked at data from the UK Biobank, an anonymous health and lifestyle database. They looked at data from over 81,052 middle aged participants, of whom 22,368 reported not undertaking any leisure time physical activity and no more than a single recreational walk per week. Participants had worn a motion tracker for a week, so researchers were able to use a machine learning algorithm to identify short bouts of vigorous physical activity throughout each day.

They found that in women who weren’t undertaking leisure time physical exercise, a longer total duration of short vigorous exercise bouts was associated with reduced risk of cardiovascular events. A mere 3.4 minutes per day was associated with a 45% risk reduction, with longer durations yielding increasing reductions in risk. In men the relationship was less clear, with 5.6 minutes of vigorous activity yielding only a 16% risk reduction, which did not reach statistical significance. 

Contrary to those not exercising for leisure, the benefits of short but vigorous physical activity were similar between in men and women who reported undertaking leisure time physical activity.

The implications:

It appears as though women may benefit more than men from this type of physical activity, but only in the absence of recreational exercise. Why? The authors suggest that this may simply be down to differences in muscle size and muscle function between the sexes, and the fact that the study measured the absolute intensity of physical exercise, not the relative intensity. Women may not need as much exercise to achieve the required load to activate long term cardiovascular adaptations. This may also explain why there were minimal sex differences among people who reported undertaking recreational exercise – their bouts of vigorous exercise were more likely to have been undertaken during activities that were voluntary and designed with the intention of improving physical fitness or strength, so the loads on the male participants would likely be higher.

More studies will be needed to investigate these differences further. Based on this study, however, it seems as though opting for the stairs instead of the lift could be quite worthwhile if you don’t get a lot of exercise, but perhaps less worthwhile for men than for women.