- A study suggests that women may have an advantage over men if they burn fat during exercise.
- Fit people also burn fat more efficiently. You can improve your aerobic fitness by exercising.
- To burn fat more efficiently, it is also important to perform well in long workouts, such as endurance.
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According to new research, women may have an advantage if they burn fat.
A few studies published this month found that women tend to burn more fat than men during exercise, and athletes with better endurance of all sexes burn more fat than their less fit counterparts.
One study, published in the International Journal of Sport Nutrition and Exercise Metabolism by Bath University researchers, looked at 73 healthy adults aged 19-63 while taking an empty stomach on a fitness test.
The researchers found that participants who burned the most fat were those with the best cardio fitness, measured by how much oxygen they could use during a workout (VO2 peak).
But the study also consistently burned more fat than men.
The same group of researchers was able to determine how participants burned fat for fuel in a second study, published March 6 in Experimental Physiology. They found that specific proteins in muscle tissue helped break down fat more efficiently during energy.
However, it is still not clear why the female participants were able to burn more fat than the males.
Being fit can improve your fat burning ability regardless of gender or lifestyle
Fitter people burned more fat during this exercise, regardless of lifestyle factors such as diet and exercise habits.
Previous research has suggested that more active people burn more fat. This was not the case in this study. While exercising more often may have greater endurance, the data found that exercise habits seem to have no fat-burning benefit.
It also did not matter whether participants ate more carbohydrates or more fat in their diet.
These results suggest that if you want to exercise your body to be a fat burning machine during exercise, your best chance is not hours of steady cardio or a special diet. Rather, try to improve your overall aerobic endurance.
To do this, you may want to consider adding short, intense bursts of work with even shorter rest periods to your workouts. For example, you can run for 20 seconds, rest and repeat for 10 seconds. Do this six to eight rounds – the pace should be intense enough that you feel exhausted after a few minutes. This is often known as Tabata style training.
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Better fat burning can give female athletes an edge in endurance
How efficiently you burn fat during exercise is important for certain types of athletic performance. This is because fat serves as fuel during periods of low to moderate intensity, especially over long periods of time. During short exercises, the body uses stored carbohydrates to stimulate muscles. But it is quickly depleted, and then the body switches to its other form of stored energy, fat, to carry you through the rest of the activity.
This makes fat burning especially valuable for endurance, such as marathon or ultra running. And if women can do it more effectively, it can give them longer resistance to fatigue during long workouts.
“Ultimately, a greater ability to burn fat as fuel has potential benefits for endurance by delaying the time when they run out of valuable carbohydrate stores,” said Dr. Javier Gonzalez, senior author of the studies and a human physiologist at the University of Bath, said in a press release.
Women may also be more physically resilient than men
These findings support previous evidence that women are better able to stay strong during long workouts, running or other physical activities than men.
According to Greg Nuckols, a researcher and author of Stronger By Science, Greg tends to be slightly more resistant to fatigue, have better blood flow in their muscles and recover faster after exertion. .
“I do not know where the origin was for the idea that women would not be able to exercise hard, or should not exercise,” Nuckols told Insider.
This better fat burning may also explain why women tend to be more sensitive to insulin, a hormone that regulates blood sugar. Insulin sensitivity is a sign of a healthy metabolism, indicating that women are more metabolically flexible than men.