Why women need to exercise differently from men
Women need different types of exercise from men and, particularly as they age, resistance training is key, says Niki Bezzant in this edited extract from her latest book.
Exercise physiologist Stacy Sims has spent her career studying female exercisers, and the differences between men and women when it comes to sport and movement. She’s been vocal in highlighting the fact that women, as she puts it, are not small men.
Sims describes midlife couples doing the same fitness boot camps or F45 classes: the man will get stronger and fitter and more sculpted, while the woman gets frustrated because the same thing isn’t happening for her; instead, she’s just getting exhausted and racking up injuries.
New Zealand-based trainer Tracy Minnoch-Nuku describes her own experience in similar terms. She used to be, she says, “the cardio queen”. But as she hit perimenopause, she started to find her recovery slower and her body hurting more.
She sees it in the women she trains, too, and it affects their relationships with fitness. “I see lots of women who have continued to train at the gym or go to classes or do Zumba,” says Minnoch-Nuku.
“And then they slow down because they’re hurting. So then they leave the gym because they don’t see a programme that speaks to them, or all they’re left with is a [high-intensity] workout and that’s hurting.
“And they’re not recovering so they can go back the next day. They’re told: you’ve gotta do it every day. So they go to a yoga studio or a Pilates studio. Now, there’s lots of things about that that are really awesome, but they’ve left out the fundamental space or experience that they need for their body for health in midlife.”
What she’s referring to is the fact it’s emerging that women need different types of exercise from men, and we also need different exercise as we age. And we’re going to be better off focusing on quality, not quantity. Women have very different things going on in our bodies, at every stage of life – and of course that’s in large part due to our hormones. Oestrogen has a role to play in this story. As we know, we have oestrogen receptors in our muscles, and as we age and the hormone declines, the signals to those receptors get weaker. It means we tend to lose muscle mass quite dramatically. That’s on top of the normal muscle loss that happens with ageing in all people. In women, the decline is more dramatic.
Sims explains what she and her fellow researchers have discovered: there’s a particularly big change in body composition in the three to four years leading up to menopause. “That’s when that massive amount of change happens, where we see a significant decrease in lean mass and an increase in fat mass. Then a few years after menopause itself – so, early post-menopause – things start to kind of level out.
Sims and colleagues also found that as we age, we tend to develop a negative nitrogen balance, meaning we’re losing more than we’re taking in. Nitrogen is used by the body to make amino acids, the building blocks of protein (which is used to make muscle), so we can end up not processing the protein we consume as well as we need to, to create lean mass.