- Women may have an advantage over men when it comes to burning fat while exercising, a study suggests.
- Fit people also burn fat more efficiently. You can improve your aerobic fitness through training.
- Burning fat more efficiently is also critical to good performance in long workouts, such as endurance races.
- Visit the Insider home page for more stories.
Women may have an advantage when it comes to burning fat, according to new research.
Two studies published this month found that women tend to burn more fat than men during exercise, and athletes with better cardiovascular endurance of all sexes burn more fat than their less fit counterparts.
A study, published in the International Journal of Sports Nutrition and Exercise Metabolism by researchers at the University of Bath, assessed 73 healthy adults aged 19 to 63 while taking part in a fitness test on cycling on an empty stomach.
The researchers found that the participants who burned the most fat were those with the best cardiovascular fitness, measured by the amount of oxygen they could use during a workout (peak VO2).
But women also consistently burned more fat than men, the study found.
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 for energy during a workout more efficiently.
However, it is not yet clear why female participants were able to burn more fat than men.
Being fit can improve your fat-burning ability, regardless of gender or lifestyle
Better fit people burned more fat during exercise testing in this study, regardless of lifestyle factors such as diet and exercise habits.
Previous research has suggested that more active people tend to burn more fat. This was not the case in this study. While exercising more often can increase the likelihood that you will have a good stamina, the data found that exercise habits do not appear to be associated with any advantage in burning fat.
It also didn’t matter whether the participants ate more carbohydrates or more fat in their diets.
These results suggest that if you want to train your body to be a fat burning machine while exercising, your best bet is not hours of constant cardio or a special diet. Instead, try to improve your overall aerobic endurance.
To do this, consider adding short, intense bursts of work with even shorter rest periods. For example, you can run for 20 seconds, rest for 10 seconds and repeat. Do this for six to eight rounds – the pace should be intense enough that you feel exhausted after a few minutes. This is generally known as Tabata-style training.
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Better fat burning can give female athletes an edge in endurance sports
The efficiency with which you burn fat while exercising is important for certain types of athletic performance. This is because fat serves as fuel for the body during periods of low to moderate intensity exercise, especially for long periods. During short periods of exercise, the body uses stored carbohydrates to feed the muscles. But it runs out quickly, at which point the body shifts to its other form of stored energy, fat, to carry it through the rest of the activity.
This makes burning fat especially valuable for endurance sports, such as marathon or ultra-running. And if women are able to do this more efficiently, it can make them more resistant to fatigue during long workouts.
“Ultimately, a greater ability to burn fat as a fuel has potential benefits for endurance athletes, delaying the time when they run out of precious carbohydrate stores,” Dr. Javier Gonzalez, senior author of the studies and human physiologist at the University of Bath said in a press release.
Women can also be more resilient physically than men
These findings support previous evidence that women may be better able to stay strong during long workouts, runs or other physical activities than men.
Women tend to be slightly more resistant to fatigue, have better blood flow in their muscles and have a faster recovery after effort than men, according to Greg Nuckols, exercise science researcher and writer at Stronger By Science , who studied gender differences in exercise.
“I don’t know where the idea originated that women couldn’t train a lot or shouldn’t try hard,” Nuckols told Insider.
This better burning of fat could also explain why women tend to have better sensitivity to insulin, a hormone that regulates blood sugar. Insulin sensitivity is a sign of healthy metabolism, suggesting that women are more metabolically flexible than men.