Vigorous exercise study

[Tubs11]

47% of women have done no vigorous exercise in the past 12 months

This news story had irked me and feels like a women bashing exercise

Me: I haven't done vigorous exercise since pre pandemic and damn right I have no motivation or interest in doing any as I'm still knackered from having to raise and educate kids whilst working during the pandemic. Incidentally I'm the thinnest I've ever been as I didn't have time to eat!!

Anyone else annoyed by this study?

But walking at 4miles an hour won't have you so out of breath that you can't hold a conversation.

When I was training for a walking marathon I used to maintain 4mph but I would also hold a conversation throughout (save for very big hills).

This is the issue, walking 4 miles in an hour is great for health but falls into the "no vigorous exercise" category.

Well your last sentence is key isn't it?

Fitter people are generally less expensive.

What is vigorous exercise?

HIT etc is bad for menopause age women, we should be lifting weights and doing moderate/less exercise when it comes to running/cycling/swimming etc

All this exercise for exercise' sake hasn't altered the human lifespan at all (it probably keeps people healthier for longer though).

I thought healthy life expectancy hasn't changed

Says a bit further up in the thread
Out of breath and sweaty basically so not a gentle stroll

I'd also second (third!) people joining the weight lifting thread and if you want to get started. They're a friendly, knowledgeable bunch. Though I mostly lurk as I'm a complete novice still.

There's also a yoga thread following Adrienne yoga.

Oh I see!

It reminds me of a story that x% of women would give up work if they won the lottery. The % men who said the same was really similar but no one cared about that.

I wonder what parameters they set for "vigorous exercise".

Why do you think HIIT is bad for that age group please?

It isn’t is it. I also question the number of people doing HIIT correctly - ie getting to a sufficiently high heart rate. I often see people in HIIT classes who certainly aren’t working to the max during the work periods

I'd also like to know why we should be doing less running/cycling/swimming on reaching menopausal age. I don't intend to decrease running on reaching that stage, quite the contrary.

um... so help me keep up.
HIT = High Intensity Training, & google gives it a very specific definition, which is about lots of weight training repetitions, and has a focus on building muscle. HIT workouts should be short & intense (I gather). As someone with many forms of RSI, which started in my 20s, I'm sympathetic that repetitions of muscle-straining exercises is bad for you. But they were bad in my 20s. Not just age 50+. I hope PP comes back to explain what PP meant. Other sources say an opposite thing, that HIT is very good for older adults.

I hate HIIT but my sister is about to turn 50 and still doing it. With her time constraints, it is an excellent option.

There are more barriers to female participation in sport than for men:

Unattractive PE curriculum/ poor PE kits/ sports bras.
Periods/ hormones/ pregnancy/ birth injury/ poor understanding and treatments of female health. HCPs often take an easy option in putting women off high impact sport rather than actually addressing health issues.
Family life/ work life balance (especially female bias of single parents)
Poorer female incomes.
Poor time tabling of "feminine" activities (I wanted to do aquafit as a rehab sport but the few classes there were at nearby swimming pools were all clashing against the school run)
Safety fears about being outside alone, especially in dark/ remote places. There's been an outcry over a recent advert showing a woman running alone in an urban area- apparently it's unrealistic.
Time/ effort to meet female standards of beauty, e.g. doing hair / make-up to look presentable after a lunchtime run.
Feminine stereotypes about sweating, weights, pelvic floors.
Poorer role modelling of professional female sport. Improving but slowly.
Fatigue from being far too much to too many people, poor sleep when child raising.

It's an important issue. Women in particular need high impact exercise to optimise their bone density and muscle mass. We need to look at ways to make it more practical to look after our health better. Creches at public leisure centres were an early victim of austerity, and disproportionately impacts women.

It's counted as Muscle Strengthening Activity, though.

'Examples of muscle-strengthening activities include:
carrying heavy shopping bags
...<snip>
heavy gardening, such as digging and shovelling
wheeling a wheelchair
lifting and carrying children'

Seems like they've made a point of thinking of things women do more that count as a form of exercise.

If you combine it with some of the examples of vigorous to very vigorous activity, you've got something a lot of us did or do (living in a flat with no lift, for example) - carrying children and heavy shopping upstairs.

I don't see why people are feeling annoyed about the data. There's no moral values attached to it, it's just reporting what those few thousand women said when they responded to the survey, that pretty much half said they haven't done anything in the last year and their main reason is lacking motivation, not lacking time or because the social barriers are higher for women.

Eighteen months ago, my exercise was sitting back in my office chair and trying to find my lower abdominal muscles. They weren't just weak, they were numb - I genuinely couldn't feel a thing. Well, except for pain in my lower back when I was sleeping, sitting, walking, standing - but from my abdominals? Absolutely nothing. Over weeks-months, I gradually became aware of them. Now I go to the gym 3-4 times a week (30 mins to an hour usually), can walk much further and whilst I'm not going to stop having autoimmune and connective tissue disease, at least they aren't being made far less tolerable by not being as strong or as fit as I can be. And I get treated like bloody royalty when I do need physio appointments. Which is always nice.

Eh? What a crock. I do loads of HIIT and it's a mixture of cardio and weights in my classes. Have you ever done it?

I also cannot for the life of me see why menopause age women shouldn't do HIIT. Cardiovascular fitness is still an important aspect of health. I do HIIT and running alongside weight training and yoga and have no intention of stopping.

I also don't belong to a gym. I do all my exercise at home (or outdoors, for running) with the aid of YouTube and a few weights.

In fairness to jeaux90, they mentioned HIT not HIIT. HIT & HIIT are apparently different. HIT seems to be resistance-, repetition- and muscle-building oriented & HIIT sounds more intensely aerobic on these definitions. That said, jeaux90 seemed to be describing HIIT as what she thought was bad thing for older females (and then jeaux seemed to be recommending HIT). Which suggests I'm not the only one finding these terms totally pointless & useless confusing.

Personally I'd say just do what feels good, because evidently many/most women struggle to do any exercise.

My grandparents didn't have to. They lugged coal up to the house, trimmed trees and moved all the wood, buckets of water and ao on. Their lifestyles allowed for it naturally.
Some jobs still over it actually in aome way as well. But for majority life changed to more comfy so instead of some common work (like the coal etc) we have to work out.

To be clear, I can’t see why either HIIT or HIT should be bad for menopausal women. It’s a very specific group the PP mentioned.

in terms of life exercise, I agree a lot of people have it. I don’t. I live in a small flat, I work at home. I do jobs round mum’s house but that’s not a biggie. So I have to exercise to have even a very basic level of movement.