Girls, exercise harder

Dole nutrition has done extensive research on exercise and here is an article that summarizes how they thing you should exercise. Try working out harder for a shorter period of time and see how your body reacts to it.

Ladies, are you lollygagging when you ought to be lifting, puttering when you ought to be pumping, trifling when you ought to be training? According to a recent Gallup Poll, nearly half of adult women under 50 say they never engage in vigorous physical exercise — worse, the boys are beating the girls hands down: only 28% of men in that same age group wimp out when they work out.

While moderate exercise can help you improve fitness, taking it easy at the gym won’t take off the pounds. Plus, too many workouts at the same low intensity won’t provide the kind of stress needed to fight bone and muscle loss as your body ages.

Namby-pamby exercising won’t do much to reduce your mortality risk either, according to a recent study by the Rush University Medical Center in Chicago. Following fitness levels of a group of generally healthy women ages 35-93 over the course of a decade, researchers divided them into three categories: most fit, moderately fit and least fit.

While it may be no surprise that women who were least fit were three times more likely to die during the course of the course of the study than the most fit group — women in the middle fitness range were also two times more likely to die than those who were in the best shape.

Another report presented at this year’s annual meeting of the American Association for Cancer Research zeroed in on the exercise-longevity link with regard to breast cancer. Physical fitness has already been found to lower women’s chances of developing breast cancer — but now it seems exercise can slash the risk of dying from breast cancer even after it has been diagnosed.

Using data from the large-scale, long-term Nurses’ Health Study, researchers focused on the fitness levels of women after they were diagnosed with breast cancer and found that women who walked just 1 to 3 hours a week cut their risk of dying from the disease by 25%. Those who walked 3 to 8 hours cut their risk in half!

So yes, while it may be true that a little exercise is better than none at all, when it comes to protecting your health and reducing your mortality risks, less is definitely NOT more!

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