Women Need to Exercise Harder to Sweat

A new research carried out by Japanese scientists at Osaka International University and Kobe University, suggests that women need to work harder than men to start sweating, as men have proved to be more effective sweaters during exercise.

This is the first study that looks at the differences in sweating depending on sexes.

The scientists assessed men and women's sweating performances depending on changes in exercise intensity and climate.

They asked four groups of people to cycle continuously for an hour, in a controlled environment with increasing intensity intervals.

The participants included trained and untrained women and trained and untrained men, and the final results showed that men are more efficient at sweating.

Another conclusion of the research was that exercise improves sweating in both sexes, even though the improvement is more significant in men.

The worse sweating response were those of untrained women, who needed a higher body temperature than others to begin sweating.

“It appears that women are at a disadvantage when they need to sweat a lot during exercise, especially in hot conditions,” said the coordinator of the study, Yoshimitsu Inoue.

A reason for which men sweat more efficiently than women has been given by previous studies, who suggested that testosterone could enhance the sweating response.

This research is important for assessing exercise capacity and heat tolerance in humans, and also the different ways that the two sexes cope with heat waves.

Inuoe has an evolutionary explanation to women sweating less than men: he says that “women generally have less body fluid than men and may become dehydrated more easily.

“Therefore the lower sweat loss in women may be an adaptation strategy that attaches importance to survival in a hot environment, while the higher sweat rate in men may be a strategy for greater efficiency of action or labor.”

He advises women to be more careful than men in hot conditions but not without adding that “both men and women can acclimate themselves better to heat if they exercise regularly before a heat wave comes.”

This research was published in the journal Experimental Physiology.