08/02/2026
A study we should all know about: 🔥 Women who exercise (esp. strength training) literally live longer ‼️
Published in Feb 2024, this observational study looked at data from over 400,000 individuals (which is a ton of subjects!), and it found that women reduce their risk of premature death more than men do as the result of exercising regularly.
And strength training in particular seemed to have an especially large effect in this regard! 💪
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Now, we’ve of course known for a long time that exercise has a huge and positive effect on *everyone’s* health and longevity – both women *and* men!
But this new study suggests that women actually have even *more* to gain from exercise than men do. ☝️
When it comes to cardiovascular disease (a.k.a. heart disease), women who strength trained 2-3x/week reduced their risk of dying from heart disease by 30% (!), while men reduced their risk by 11%.
And there were of course extremely positive benefits associated with aerobic training/cardio as well. (But strength training seemed to have a slightly stronger effect! 🤯)
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The main takeaway is that, as always, exercise is amazing for everyone’s health, and may be the closest thing to a “fountain of youth” that we all have.
But we know from research that, on average, women exercise LESS than men do.
From the study: “It has been long known that female individuals persistently lag behind male individuals in physical activity engagement—manifesting a ‘gender gap’ that begins early in life and continues throughout adulthood.”
Therefore, the news that women may have even more to gain from exercise than men do should be shared far and wide!
More people need to be exercising in our society in general (fewer than 25% of all Americans meet the minimum guidelines for physical activity by the CDC 😕), but this is especially true of women!
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Ref: Ji, Hongwei, et al. "S*x differences in association of physical activity with all-cause and cardiovascular mortality." Journal of the American College of Cardiology 83.8 (2024): 783-793.
