The Rundown

Mind the (Gender) Gap. A new study from the Smidt Heart Institute at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center says there is a gender gap between women and men when it comes to exercise. Specifically, women can exercise less often than men yet receive the same cardiovascular gains.

Researchers looked at data from over 400,000 U.S. adults using the National Health Interview Survey database and focused on participants between 1997 to 2019 who provided data on leisure-time physical activity. Females made up 55% of the group.

When the team looked at moderate to vigorous aerobic activity (brisk walking or cycling), they found that men reached their maximal survival benefit from doing this level of exercise for around five hours per week. Women reached the same degree of benefit from exercising just under two and a half hours per week.

For weightlifting or core exercises, men reached their peak benefit from doing three sessions per week and women gained the same amount of benefit from one session per week.

Women had even more gains if they did more than two and half hours per week of moderate to vigorous aerobic activity or did two or more sessions of strength training per week.

Christine Albert, MD, MPH, chair of the Department of Cardiology in the Smidt Heart Institute, hopes that the study will “motivate women who are not currently engaged in regular physical activity to understand that they are in a position to gain tremendous benefit for each increment of regular exercise they are able to invest in their longer-term health.”

Strength For Injury Prevention? The rationale for strength training as a way to prevent running injuries makes sense in exercise science. Injuries happen when a tissue experiences more stress than it can handle so strengthening that tissue should make it less prone to injury. But a new systematic review says it’s time to approach that idea with caution.

The meta-analysis looked at nine studies with a little over 1,900 subjects. The strength routines were varied and included lunges and squats, plyometric hops and jumps, core routines, foot strengthening and more. Generally, there wasn’t a significant benefit for the exercise groups compared to the control groups in either injury risk or injury rate.

In his summary of the analysis for Outside magazine, Alex Hutchinson notes that it doesn’t address whether or not a straight forward strength routine offers injury prevention benefits.

He also argues that while robust research has found a strength approach works in sports like soccer, it “doesn’t mean it will work in running, since the injury mechanisms are different, but it does suggest that it’s worth finding out.”

One interesting point from the analysis was that the three studies that had the lowest injury risk were also the three where the strength routine was supervised rather than done unsupervised by the participant at home.

The takeaway: It’s unclear from the science if strength training or other forms of exercise lower your injury risk while running but the logic is there and so is the evidence from other sports.

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