Everything we’ve been told about working out may be wrong, especially for women.
Historically, women have been underrepresented in clinical trials and health-based research. Fitness guidelines turned out to be similar.
In a recent paper from the University of New South Wales, researchers conducted a review of over 1,500 studies that referenced 11 fitness consensus statements from around the world. These statements, which are used to develop exercise guidelines and recommendations, were all developed over the last 20 years and include data from over 100 million total participants.
In the adult study, 70 percent of the participants were men. Two-thirds of the studies included only male participants, and only 12% were female only. Among older adults, the distribution of data between males and females was more even, and there were actually slightly more female participants. However, most adult fitness guidelines to date are based on what works best for men.
Mandy Hagstrom, Senior Lecturer in Exercise Physiology at the University of New South Wales and author of the review, said: “There are many physiological differences between men and women that may lead to different best-practice exercise regimens. It means that there is a Newsweek.
“For example, women are more resistant to fatigue, which means they may need to do more exercise in the same session to achieve the same results. Because it takes a long time, it might make sense for women to perhaps take more rest after this kind of session. However, these questions have not been tested in long-term exercise intervention studies. ”
What we do know is that physiologically, some distinct differences between biological sexes can affect athletic performance and strength gains. “We have different physiological environments, different hormones, different body structures,” Hagstrom says. “For example, women have more type 1 muscle fibers. [fibers that produce low power contractions but that are slow to fatigue]small lungs and short stature.
“Furthermore, women experience multiple changes in physiology throughout life, such as menarche, pregnancy, and menopause, which may affect exercise responses differently than men experience at similar life stages.”
This imbalance may be due to the fact that until recently weightlifting was seen as a predominantly male hobby. This is no longer the case.a Recent research In Australia, where the researchers are based, they found that women were slightly more likely than men to meet a sufficient level of strength-building activity among about 200,000 participants. Similar results seen in America
It’s clear that more research is needed to understand how workout routines can be tailored for women’s bodies. “Further studies, especially long-term training studies, directly investigating sex differences in resistance training are needed,” said Hagstrom. “We also need more research that focuses solely on female cohorts. This area is understudied and will help us understand when and if differences between men and women exist.”
Hagstrom and her team not only surveyed study participants, but also analyzed the gender of the authors of 11 consensus statements. Similar discrepancies were found here. Only 13 percent of the authors were women, and 91 percent of all lead authors were men.
This imbalance not only indicates an underrepresentation of women in research roles, but may also affect women’s participation in research itself. “Research in other fields has shown that female authors are more likely to report data by gender, which means we can investigate if and when differences exist.” said Hagstrom. “There are also studies that show that female authors tend to involve more women in research.”
The authors of this study acknowledged that the findings of the study published in the journal were: sports medicine Data for June 29 were based on binary data that are not representative of all members of society. “It’s worth noting that studies tend to use dualism, not serving people of all sexes or gender diversity well,” Hagstrom said. “We acknowledge that the methods we have chosen to classify sex and gender may have resulted in misclassification for some people.”
While there are many unanswered questions, this review indicates that more research is needed to understand how fitness recommendations differ by gender. “Our findings are important because the first step is to help raise awareness about the degree of gender bias in the data we rely on,” Hagstrom said. “Many people probably didn’t realize that we make so many assumptions when it comes to prescribing exercise.
“We found that the guidelines did not consider these factors and hope that they will be considered in future guidelines.”
