A recent study has suggested that women may have an edge over men when it comes to heart health and exercise, deriving more benefits from less physical activity than males, reports TIME Magazine.
The researchers in China had analysed data from 85 000 people without heart disease who were registered in the UK Biobank, a dataset that tracked participants’ physical activity levels using accelerometers and recorded heart events and deaths over an average of seven years.
Women who met exercise guidelines from the WHO and the American Heart Association – 175 minutes per week of moderate-to-vigorous activity, or 75 minutes per week of intense activity – had a 22% lower risk of heart events than those who didn’t meet the guidelines, while men had a 17% lower risk, showed the findings of the study, published in Nature Cardiovascular Research.
Further analysis showed that women were able to lower their heart risk with smaller amounts of exercise than men were. To lower their risk by 30%, men had to exercise for 530 minutes a week, while women had to be physically active for only 250 minutes a week: about half as long.
“We are quite surprised that females achieved cardiovascular benefits comparable to those of males with only about half of the physical activity,” said Jiajin Chen, a researcher at the Institute of Cardiovascular Diseases at Xiamen University Cardiovascular Hospital, who led the study.
What’s more, women who did the recommended amount of exercise experienced a striking threefold reduction in mortality risk compared with males, according to Chen.
Dr Emily Lau, director of Women’s Heart Health at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Massachusetts General Heart and Vascular Institute, wrote a commentary on the findings and their implications.
“Women appear to have a physical activity advantage,” she said. “Yet we see time and time again that women are less physically active and less likely to achieve the recommended physical activity targets. This highlights an opportunity for the medical community to think about how we can tailor our recommendations to women. Because what we are doing now is not quite working.”
The results are a starting point for additional studies to better understand why women might be deriving more benefit from exercise than men, even at lower amounts.
While the study did not explore potential explanations for the findings, Chen said that scientists have some theories.
First, women have higher oestrogen levels than men, and before menopause, oestrogen may be protecting cardiovascular health, which in part may explain why women tend to develop heart events at later ages than men.
Trials also show that men who take oestrogen supplements can improve their coronary heart disease since it helps to break down lipids during exercise. There are also differences in muscle make-up among men and women and in muscle metabolism.
Chen did not analyse whether menopause, after which oestrogen levels drop in women, led to any differences in the exercise benefit women achieved. However, the women in the study were generally older, probably past menopause, “with a mean age of nearly 62.
The number of pre-menopausal women was too small to provide a reliable comparison.
“Based on the results, our findings provide valuable evidence for sex-specific prevention of coronary heart disease by using wearable devices,” Chen said. “We believe that in the era of personalised medicine, future interventions will increasingly be tailored to individual characteristics to maximise cardiovascular benefits.”
Lau agreed. “We have to stop treating men and women as the same. It’s 2025, and we are still doing the same things where we take data from men and extrapolate them to women. We see studies telling us men and women are different, yet the guidelines for them are all the same.”
That could lead to more refined advice for improving heart health that may not look exactly the same for women and men, not just on exercise but for other heart health risk factors as well. “It’s time for us to really change the framework for how we think about sex-specific research and clinical recommendations,” Lau added.
Study details
Sex differences in the association of wearable accelerometer-derived physical activity with coronary heart disease incidence and mortality
Jiajin Chen, Yuliang Wang, Zihang Zhong, Xin Chen, Le Zhang, Lingjun Jie, Yangyang Zhang & Yan Wang.
Published in Nature Cardiovascular Research on 27 October 2025
Abstract
Despite American Heart Association, European Society of Cardiology and World Health Organisation (AHA/ESC/WHO) guidelines uniformly recommending 150 min week−1 of moderate-to-vigorous physical activity (MVPA) for both sexes, a substantial ‘gender gap’ persists in exercise capacity and guideline adherence, and its impact on coronary heart disease (CHD) development and prognosis remains underexplored. Here we analyzed the accelerometer-measured MVPA of 80,243 CHD-free participants to assess CHD incidence and 5,169 patients with CHD to evaluate all-cause mortality. Compared with non-adherent counterparts, guideline-adherent participants showed a 22% lower CHD risk in female individuals (hereinafter referred to as females) and a 17% lower CHD risk in male individuals (hereinafter referred to as males; (Pinteraction = 0.009). Notably, females achieved a CHD risk reduction of 30% (hazard ratio (HR) = 0.70) with 250 min week−1 of MVPA, whereas males required 530 min week−1 for comparable benefits. Among patients with CHD, active females experienced greater mortality risk reduction than males (HR = 0.30 versus 0.81; Pinteraction = 0.004). Similar sex differences were observed when analyzing guideline-adhering days (Pinteraction < 0.05). Our findings underscore the value of sex-specific tailored CHD prevention strategies using wearable devices, which may help bridge the ‘gender gap’ by motivating females to engage in physical activity.
TIME Magazine article – Exercise May Benefit Women’s Hearts More Than Men’s (Open access)
See more from MedicalBrief archives:
Why women are beating men to the finish line
Sex differences in ‘normal’ blood pressure and associated CVD risk
Women need half as much exercise as men for longevity – US study