Why training research might be useful for all athletes
Acolleague told me that research behind most exercise advice is based almost entirely on men, making the tips we read in magazines and elsewhere somewhat suspect. Is this true, and does it mean I must unlearn everything I thought I needed to do?
That’s how you open a can of worms on a Monday morning. Yes, it’s true, the not-so-wellkept secret of the exercise science broederbond has been exposed. I fully expect President Cyril Ramaphosa to ask a retired judge to set up an inquiry and deliver the findings in 2027 for him to start deliberating.
Until then, we need to figure this out on our own. Some prefer to avoid the topic of gender and sex altogether for fear of being targeted by the woke police. Luckily, I escape all scrutiny because I am a man in my 40s who identifies as an Agony’Aunt Let s agree in that the well-edited we are going pages of the continent’s preeminent business newspaper. Layers of complexity here. to talk about sex and not gender. We are going to ask why people with certain defined biological characteristics, female, are excluded from most exercise research studies. We’re not talking about people who identify as men, women or nonbinary, because females have not been excluded on the basis of how they identify.
On the surface, one could make a compelling case that the exclusion has been driven by some kind of cultural menstrual taboo mentality. It would appear female subjects have been excluded because of the complexity of changes that occur in their bodies as a result of their menstrual cycle, the use of contraception and menopause.
In a shared byline article in The Conversation, the authors, an associate professor and a PhD candidate who strongly advocate for producing research relevant to females, write that including female subjects — and factoring in this cascade of complexity — is timeconsuming and expensive, and time and money are limiting factors for research. They say this is changing, and there’ sa concerted effort worldwide to align exercise science with reality. In other words, account for biological variability.
You’d be forgiven for thinking you’ve woken up in a sarcastic 1950s housewife meme. Luckily, you haven’t, and now you need to decide what to do about your training.
Should you just ditch it and say, “Nah, this is for men”? The short answer is that the brilliant exercise scientists in this country and the rest of the world have designed exercise methodologies and advice that really does work for females and males. Despite the maledominated literature, their advice works, so follow it.
And to encourage you to keep going, a new study suggests that females have the upper hand when it comes to exercising and living longer, which is no doubt linked to the same complex biological differences and the associated response to exercise.
The study, published in February in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology, tracked more than 400,000 men and women with underlying health conditions between 1997 and 2017.
By the end of December 2019, almost 40,000 had died, of which 11,670 were cardiovascular deaths.
While the study relied on self-reported exercise frequency and duration, which may muddy the veracity of the data, a fascinating finding was that females derived the same longevity and survival rates as males by doing half as much exercise.
For any amount of time spent doing exercise, women benefited more.
There could be many reasons for this. Talking to The Guardian, a professor who was not involved in the study speculated that perhaps the females’ relative effort was higher or that biological and skeletal muscle differences may have accounted for different physiological responses to the same stimulus. It’s fascinating!
Co-lead author Martha Gulati said in a press release about the research: “The beauty of this study is learning that women can get more out of each minute of moderate to vigorous activity than men do. It’s an incentivising notion that we hope women will take to heart.”
In clichéd business-speak, the key take-home is that exercise is good for you, it is likely to make you live longer, and if you are a woman, you really don’t need to compare yourself with men.