Colour me surprised. I imagined the figure for men would be about the same, I was wrong.
I’ve not done any vigorous exercise since cross country 1993…
Hardly surprising, why would you need to when main stream health advice says do about 10,000 steps a day.
Good when you do that, but hardly vigorous.
Probably doesn’t help that the body positivity movement attacked basis tenets of health
It’s hard to fit in work, exercise, house work, second work, the kids, actually enjoying yourself, etc.
That said I have recently started running again and the impact of exercise on wellbeing and health really is almost immediate.
Now its mostly about time and life/work stress. When I was younger there was definitely this worry from women about being “mannish” which terrified some women I knew about doing any exercise.
> The NHS defines vigorous exercise as activities such as running, swimming, an aerobics class or gymnastics
So my resistance band workouts, skipping and vigorous masturbation sessions don’t count?!
I’m doomed.
Come on… How many people actually DO? 10%?
I have twin toddlers. There is no desire to do a whole session of rigorous exercise when it is non stop chasing around, bending, lifting and what not.
I could not imagine a whole day of *this* after a rigorous morning workout. I’m happily pacing myself over here.
I used beat myself up for not exercising enough.
I have since learnt to accept that I will simply not always have energy for vigorous exercise given my long working hours/commute and social commitments. Instead I go for daily walks and run when I feel like it. It is working out great for me. Modern lifestyle is very time consuming and fitting rigorous exercise into it may simply not be attainable for some.
Edit: typos
I’d guestimate it’s a hell of a lot more than that. Have you walked down a high Street recently?
Most people just don’t give a hoot about their health or physique. Very sad and very disappointing.
I would hazard a guess that the difference between men and women will fall down to caring responsibilities. Women are more likely to be primary carer for children and also to be caring for elderly relatives. It’s fairly normal to hear of families where half a day is taken up every weekend with dad playing football, rugby or going cycling and the mum stays home with the kids. Women are socialised to put others wellbeing before their own and consequently many struggle to find time for themselves.
The gym closest to my flat is pretty crap. It’s never tidy and in the weights area, a lot of men (it’s 90% men, I’m usually the only woman) never bother re-racking their weights. I’m 5’2″ and trying to remove 100 kgs of plates from a barbell because the guy who put them on there couldn’t be bothered to put them back is pretty exhausting and demotivating. Staff is nearly non-existent in the gym and stuff like kettlebells go missing all the time. Most gym equipment is also not built for petite women and it’s pretty hard to adjust some of the machines or move stuff due to my height.
The next closest gym doesn’t even permit women.
I’m not pretending this is representative of anything, but it can be demotivating when it comes to fitness/lifting. I wish I had a better gym near me.
By the way, if you saw my partner and I you would never guess that I’m the one that exercises way more than he does. He is thin with a lot of lean muscle, but he doesn’t do sports except football once a week.
ETA I also have an autoimmune disease so I go through phases of less and more energy.
Comes as no surprise
“A lack of time owing to work was a barrier”
Oh would you look at that corporate overlords overworking us with dumb hours and commutes strike again.
As a nation we need to address work-life balance, because its just broken, and its affecting all of us.
There’s always a rush of people on stories like this desperate to justify why so many people put 0 effort into maintaining their health. Seems like the most important thing is to decide whether something is your fault or not rather than doing what will benefit you in the long run. In a desperate rush to defend people who are stressed, over worked and under supported with work / childcare etc they end up instead harming them. Sadly reality doesn’t care whether you do no physical activity because you are busy or you sit lounging around all day you will still get the negative consequences. All this attitude serves to do is punish these people twice, now they both have a busy and stressful life and also miss out on the benefits of exercise and live a shorter life which is more impacted by ill health and worse quality of life, and this is all down to misinformation.
In reality it is not difficult to meet the recommended amounts of vigorous exercise per week, it takes around 20 minutes 3 x per week, 1 hour out of 168. In reality it doesn’t matter that you’re tired, other than being harder to motivate yourself, and in fact doing regular exercise will very shortly leave you feeling more energetic. It’s a common mistake that people make when they are busy / stressed / tired / have exams etc that they stop exercising and quickly find that they are now much more tired and performing worse in every other aspect of their life too. It’s crucial at these times to keep up with exercise and if your life is stressful, busy and you are always tired then there is even more benefit to exercise than someone whose life is relaxing (and you would also probably benefit greatly from completely cutting out caffeine as large numbers of people are constantly tired because they are addicted to caffeine). Exercise literally pays for itself in the time it will save you doing other things with more energy.
This well meaning defense actually ends up just causing further harm and further inequality in health.
good for them, helping us maintain our ugliest nation in europe crown.
Putting aside people who work crazy hours or have lots of kids etc…
In my experience a lot of people think that they don’t have time/energy to exercise after their work day. Unless you are working with heavy manual labour for hours at a time, I’m inclined not to believe this is necessarily true.
I think the reason that a lot of people feel that they don’t have energy to exercise after work is because they DON’T exericse after work and therefore have less energy. My only source for this is myself, I worked a manual labour job over lockdown for 9 months and managed to find the energy to exercise every day after work
There’s only the gym. Not much else to do in this country. Gym or pub is the choice 😂plus everyone is expected to work all the time like slaves just to make ends meet. So it’s no surprise.
After getting everyone up and to school, commute and full days work, reverse school run, cooking dinner and cleaning up, organising homework and music practice, lifts to various clubs then I have about 2 hours in the evening I could devote to exercise. At that point exercise is the LAST thing I feel like doing.
As a single parent with a useless ex-h I can’t even go early in the morning or late in the evening as I am full time parent. I think the sector of females with school age children will be over-represented in that 50%.
1) work
2) hobbies
3) relationships
Pick 2.
Best way to get exercise is to build it into your day.
Best way to do that is to drop the car and get on a bike.
I never *ever* liked exercising.
Now I bike to work, bike to the shops, bike my toddler to places outside of walking distance, bike to see my friends, bike to the pub. 320 minutes of exercise per week is now the *minimum* amount of exercise I do.
*And I’m a very very lazy person.*
And I save a bomb on petrol/car wear/parking.
Shame this country works so hard to make this a scary and offputting proposition to most people.
I don’t do vigorous exercise, I do however walk between 7 and 9 miles a day.. idk I might get my bike out then if that doesn’t count.
There are a series of social, structural and biological barriers from lack of coaches/resources, body-confidence, fear of judgement and genuinely just avoiding it whilst on their period (understandably).
Something like 1 in 3 Women stop sport after school, whilst it’s more like 1 in 10 for Men. There’s a thousand different ways we could possibly improve this and I find it quite fascinating.
I’m hoping that pushing Women’s professional sport more into the spotlight will help in terms of the social side, making it more acceptable and aspirational. But infrastructure and support needs to improve also to match.
Getting someone _back_ into regular sport/exercise is far more difficult than keeping them in it.
A lot of people (men and women) who currently do NO exercise are surprised at what they’re capable of once they take action and get started with any sort of exercise plan – both from a physical capability and available time standpoint.
A lot of us are guilty of not prioritising ourselves in life at all. Kids come first. Work. Partners. Pets. Friends. Family commitments. All take precedent above looking after ourselves.
When we finally get some time to ourselves, the natural inclination is to enjoy some TV, read, scroll on reddit – it can be EXTREMELY hard to go from a standing start to begin exercising… but the results can be substantial and immediate both mentally and physically once you begin.
For anyone short of time, has young children etc – a bodyweight program you can do at home can provide adequate exercise without the obstacles of trying to attend a gym/swimming pool etc.
There are plenty of beginner friendly exercises which can be progressed/regressed as necessary to accommodate your current fitness levels and any injuries or other barriers to exercise.
The main thing is to commit yourself. Put aside 20 minutes or so 3x per week to begin with. Prove to yourself you can do it. Then build from there.
I’m lucky to work each day with many women who were in the exact position described in the article. The important thing is to understand that everyone’s life, commitments and time available is different. Don’t expect too much if you don’t have it available. Start small and build up gradually. Even a short workout is better than no workout at all.
Don’t let ‘perfect’ be the enemy of ‘decent’. It’s never going to be the ideal time to start, so the next best time is as soon as possible.
The gym has always been a hobby for me, going 4 times per week and I consider myself lucky that I enjoy it that much. Bodybuilding after a hard day of work is something I’m excited for.
That said, I do have a lot of sympathy for people that consider it a chore, and with a hectic work schedule it’s not something many would look forward to over going out for a drink or watching some tv etc. I think some of it does have to come from a change of perspective, to go and purposefully do something to improve yourself. Experimenting with lots of different types of exercises and sports can help to find what you really enjoy.
I won’t pretend I know all the reasons, as I (female, mother, work full time) lift at the gym 3x a week, mountain bike around my area and go walking/hiking. However, I will say that when I talk of this to other women who either don’t exercise or express surprise that I do, I get some strange responses.
1. They are shocked and surprised that my husband ‘lets me’ go to the gym. These are ordinary, modern women in the workplace who say their partners wouldn’t approve of them attending a gym. Fucking baffled me, that one.
2. Their partners would not agree to look after their own children. Therefore the women can’t go anywhere without them. I was less shocked at this as I’ve heard it a lot. That a man is still some sort of superdad if he can look after his own kids. It’s shit but I guess that’s some people’s reality.
3. They tell me bike riding and walking alone is unsafe and I risk being murdered. I say I’d rather live my life and not stay indoors out of fear, but it does seem more common to be cautious in this regard. My mum says walking is ‘what sluts do’ but then she’s always been quite strange.
4. They do not like gyms and find them intimidating. I do not, but again I appreciate I might be the odd one out. I’ve asked for male spotters in the gym, been praised for a heavy lift, no weirdness. I find gyms quite a chill place. I will say that I find women in gyms a bit scarier than men, especially when hanging around in the changing rooms arguing on phones. I find that scarier than the main floor.
5. They don’t know how to get started. Eh, yeah I guess, but YouTube is right there. I don’t think that’s a good excuse anymore.
Because half of us are working class who work sleep repeat
The standard for required vigorous exercise is about 75 minutes a week – just over ten minutes a *day.*
The moderate exercise is 150 minutes, which is about 22 minutes a day.
Unless you’re literally bedbound, there’s no reason we should be failing as a country to reach those targets.
Anecdotal I know, but I help coach at a local gym offering kickboxing/MMA/jujitsu. We are purposely very welcoming to women and men alike; we have a female coach on the team, have several upcoming female competitors, and run weekly woman-only classes. We’d run more if we had enough interest.
On the rare occasion a male gym member has made a female member feel uncomfortable, they have been spoken to immediately and a couple of times we’ve had to permanently ban people over inappropriate messages on social media reported by our female members.
Despite our best efforts, we’ve found it is 1000 times harder to get a female participant to stick around long term than a male one. We’ve never really figured out why. They usually just don’t stay long except for a rare few. Speaking to my friends involved in running other types of fitness classes, they have also reported struggling to retain female members long term.
This is at a time in history when we have unprecedented amazing UK role models in combat sports such as Molly McCann (MMA), Ffion Davies (BJJ), Iman Barlow (Muay Thai), Terri Harper (boxing) and many more. It’s a true golden era for UK women’s combat sports, yet the male:female ratio at all levels from hobby through to amateur and professional competitions remains extremely skewed.
I would love to know how we can improve the gender balance at our club.
As another anecdote, my wife used to be a keen exerciser before marriage, we used to really enjoy doing kickboxing and fitness together most days, but one day after we got married she completely stopped working out and has never restarted. We have no children or other dependents and both work 9-5 from home. We have exercise equipment at home and there are gyms close to our house. Finances are not a major limiting factor. However, I train almost every day and she trains almost never (less than 5 times in the last 3 years). It seems like for whatever reason – innate or socialised – on average, women simply prioritise exercise much less than men do.
(Note: there are plenty of men who would benefit from more exercise too – the UK as a whole is undergoing a severe health crisis with more than 2/3rds of the population clinically overweight).
The figure isn’t much better for men either.
It’s not uncommon in 1st world countries that as you have more in your life, in terms of home, holidays, cars, TV, Phones, etc etc, then you start to lead a more sedentary lifestyle.
The UK population was actually fittest during, and just after WW2, when there was lots of manual labour to be done and we were all on rations.
We might not like the current cost of living, but compared to our fathers, fathers, we have a very sedentary lifestyle
Time is a problem for me as I’m looking after an elderly relative who’s far more fragile than I want her to be. Another one is every bit of exercise I’m able to do is really dull and more dull due to being almost blind. I need someone else for bike riding and a special bike. Have you ever seen people running with a cane? It’s interesting. Lifting weights requires a gym and it’s so dull. I can’t even put music on for a home work out because mothers practically whispering when she calls me though to get her something else thats going to mess up her sugar level. Everything I do has to be something that can be interrupted hell even everything I do for her gets interrupted by her so often it’s not funny. After the third interruption in fifteen min you kind of feel like someone’s trying to tell you that looking after yourself is a waste of time.
Yeah it shows.
I’m amazed it’s that it’s not more than half. Are some of them lying?
MORE THAN HALF OF BRITISH WOMEN DO VIGOROUS EXERCISE
It’s not a problem provided you’re eating relatively well. The problem starts when you have no self control over calorie intake and don’t care about what you eat / don’t try to avoid unhealthy food.
1 hour of running per day at a fairly brisk pace is the equivalent of half a bag of Doritos.
For most people, not eating the Doritos is the sensible option. It’s much easier to not eat the Doritos than it is to do an hour of running. From a calorie perspective, it’s the same thing.
I know Covid put limits on what could be done over the second half of 2020 and practically all of 2021 but I have exercised only 4 times since May 2020. And they weren’t true work outs as they were combined social activities and I felt obliged to chat and take it steady.
I went from being a really active single mum of one older child who also took part in my preferred sport to now being married with a baby, working an intense job that includes shift work that leaves me pretty exhausted. When I’m not exhausted my kids and husband need my attention. I can remember telling my husband that I used to do 3 hour sessions a couple of times a week and sometimes spend half a day working out. He didn’t particularly like the idea but turns out he needn’t have worried, I barely leave the house outside of work and chores.
I feel disgusting. I hate how I look and how unhealthy I am now. I have no idea how to make the time and justify the expense. I miss being fit.
I guess I just wanted to say thank you OP. I stopped going to the gym and regularly cycling a while ago when I started suffering from a few serious health conditions but have been doing better for a while. Reading this post has actually kind of inspired me and I’ve signed back up to try and get a few classes and a swim in each week. I’d avoided it due to not having enough time, being too stressed and still being a bit unwell but even with my health conditions I should still be able to swim most of the time.
Thank you, you have made a difference to this woman who was too nervous to go back to the gym and inspired her to bit the bullet and re-join!
I don’t need to do this for cardio. I just got covid & it gave me inappropriate sinus tachycardia so I can just hang up washing & get a heart rate of 120.
A lot of this stems right back from school age, to be honest. My sister’s a PE teacher at a secondary school and whilst there are obviously a decent number of girls that love sport, there are a disproportionately high number who hate exerting themselves in PE. There’s a range of reasons for it, but it can be shyness, not wanting to make mistakes, or not wanting to get sweaty in front of your classmates, and so on.
By the time you’ve left structured PE and grown up, I think most boys at school will have at least had a kick around of a football here and there during free time, but with girls you get a decent chunk of people who were never engaged, and that persists into adulthood. Obviously the “people who didn’t like sport as a kid” circle doesn’t fully overlap with adults who don’t exercise, but I’d say it’s one of the core contributors – and precisely why Sport England ran the fairly widely-praised “this girl can” campaign.
What this data shows to me is something fundamentally cultural that you can only really fix at a younger age, or by chucking a huge amount of money at the way people think about sport/exercise via awareness campaigns. It’s 50% of people doing no vigorous exercise *in the last 12 months*, which is frankly a huge length of time – and even the busiest parents in the world would be able to exercise at least once a year if they really wanted to, you’d have thought.
Wife is English and works in public health in the UK, alongside illustrious organizations (/s) like PHE, NHS, Sport England, and various NGBs of several sports.
Studies like this are nonsense. The source data is absolutely shit. There is zero budget in these orgs for mathematicians and statisticians to analyze the data, social scientists to design the right questions and methods, or data scientists/programmers to clean the data, get it into a usable form, or verify its accuracy. I know because I consult for these orgs, as a “tech expert”.
And, the implication itself–that not getting this “vigorous exercise” is somehow bad–is poor health information to begin with.
On top of that, to the extent that this information is even useful at all, UK sporting culture is weird. In the US, where I’m from, amateur sport is a big deal. Women can play in local competitive volleyball, tennis, rugby(!), climbing, or soccer–excuse me, football–leagues, or get involved with wonderful coed sports like Ultimate. Here, it’s either solo sport (go swimming) or the gym (solo workouts). Why aren’t there more competitive sporting venues, and why aren’t competitive amateur sports a bigger thing here, aside from football? Or am I just not seeing it (despite having lived here for the past 5 years)? None of my wife’s friends are engaged in sport, but some do get involved with solo workouts (gym, “yoga”, pilates). Most of my friends’ wives and girlfriends–even among the non-married, no-kids couplings–also do not compete in amateur sport. I’m from California. This is weird to me.
Anyway, getting back to it, “vigorous exercise” is not going to do anything for weight, which is, for the ***VAST MAJORITY*** of people, the biggest component of health issue.
Eat (far) less, eat better, and stop drinking.
A lot of women are bigger (size wise) then men these days.
I genuinely don’t mean that to sound rude, but it’s the honest truth.
Woman, EU citizen, who used to work in the UK. I had to work overtime (everyday) unpaid. Wait for the train and commute 1hour each way, due to rent being stupidly high living closer.
I spent my weekends freelancing, (to make our budget fit) so all exercise was walking to/from the stations.
Now I live in Denmark, work 37 hours only. Got plenty of time for hobbies and exercise. Im in the best shape in 15 years and Ive lost 20% bodyweight since I lived in the UK.
It boils entirely down to time, and not having the energy.
45 comments
Colour me surprised. I imagined the figure for men would be about the same, I was wrong.
I’ve not done any vigorous exercise since cross country 1993…
Hardly surprising, why would you need to when main stream health advice says do about 10,000 steps a day.
Good when you do that, but hardly vigorous.
Probably doesn’t help that the body positivity movement attacked basis tenets of health
It’s hard to fit in work, exercise, house work, second work, the kids, actually enjoying yourself, etc.
That said I have recently started running again and the impact of exercise on wellbeing and health really is almost immediate.
Now its mostly about time and life/work stress. When I was younger there was definitely this worry from women about being “mannish” which terrified some women I knew about doing any exercise.
> The NHS defines vigorous exercise as activities such as running, swimming, an aerobics class or gymnastics
So my resistance band workouts, skipping and vigorous masturbation sessions don’t count?!
I’m doomed.
Come on… How many people actually DO? 10%?
I have twin toddlers. There is no desire to do a whole session of rigorous exercise when it is non stop chasing around, bending, lifting and what not.
I could not imagine a whole day of *this* after a rigorous morning workout. I’m happily pacing myself over here.
I used beat myself up for not exercising enough.
I have since learnt to accept that I will simply not always have energy for vigorous exercise given my long working hours/commute and social commitments. Instead I go for daily walks and run when I feel like it. It is working out great for me. Modern lifestyle is very time consuming and fitting rigorous exercise into it may simply not be attainable for some.
Edit: typos
I’d guestimate it’s a hell of a lot more than that. Have you walked down a high Street recently?
Most people just don’t give a hoot about their health or physique. Very sad and very disappointing.
I would hazard a guess that the difference between men and women will fall down to caring responsibilities. Women are more likely to be primary carer for children and also to be caring for elderly relatives. It’s fairly normal to hear of families where half a day is taken up every weekend with dad playing football, rugby or going cycling and the mum stays home with the kids. Women are socialised to put others wellbeing before their own and consequently many struggle to find time for themselves.
The gym closest to my flat is pretty crap. It’s never tidy and in the weights area, a lot of men (it’s 90% men, I’m usually the only woman) never bother re-racking their weights. I’m 5’2″ and trying to remove 100 kgs of plates from a barbell because the guy who put them on there couldn’t be bothered to put them back is pretty exhausting and demotivating. Staff is nearly non-existent in the gym and stuff like kettlebells go missing all the time. Most gym equipment is also not built for petite women and it’s pretty hard to adjust some of the machines or move stuff due to my height.
The next closest gym doesn’t even permit women.
I’m not pretending this is representative of anything, but it can be demotivating when it comes to fitness/lifting. I wish I had a better gym near me.
By the way, if you saw my partner and I you would never guess that I’m the one that exercises way more than he does. He is thin with a lot of lean muscle, but he doesn’t do sports except football once a week.
ETA I also have an autoimmune disease so I go through phases of less and more energy.
Comes as no surprise
“A lack of time owing to work was a barrier”
Oh would you look at that corporate overlords overworking us with dumb hours and commutes strike again.
As a nation we need to address work-life balance, because its just broken, and its affecting all of us.
There’s always a rush of people on stories like this desperate to justify why so many people put 0 effort into maintaining their health. Seems like the most important thing is to decide whether something is your fault or not rather than doing what will benefit you in the long run. In a desperate rush to defend people who are stressed, over worked and under supported with work / childcare etc they end up instead harming them. Sadly reality doesn’t care whether you do no physical activity because you are busy or you sit lounging around all day you will still get the negative consequences. All this attitude serves to do is punish these people twice, now they both have a busy and stressful life and also miss out on the benefits of exercise and live a shorter life which is more impacted by ill health and worse quality of life, and this is all down to misinformation.
In reality it is not difficult to meet the recommended amounts of vigorous exercise per week, it takes around 20 minutes 3 x per week, 1 hour out of 168. In reality it doesn’t matter that you’re tired, other than being harder to motivate yourself, and in fact doing regular exercise will very shortly leave you feeling more energetic. It’s a common mistake that people make when they are busy / stressed / tired / have exams etc that they stop exercising and quickly find that they are now much more tired and performing worse in every other aspect of their life too. It’s crucial at these times to keep up with exercise and if your life is stressful, busy and you are always tired then there is even more benefit to exercise than someone whose life is relaxing (and you would also probably benefit greatly from completely cutting out caffeine as large numbers of people are constantly tired because they are addicted to caffeine). Exercise literally pays for itself in the time it will save you doing other things with more energy.
This well meaning defense actually ends up just causing further harm and further inequality in health.
good for them, helping us maintain our ugliest nation in europe crown.
Putting aside people who work crazy hours or have lots of kids etc…
In my experience a lot of people think that they don’t have time/energy to exercise after their work day. Unless you are working with heavy manual labour for hours at a time, I’m inclined not to believe this is necessarily true.
I think the reason that a lot of people feel that they don’t have energy to exercise after work is because they DON’T exericse after work and therefore have less energy. My only source for this is myself, I worked a manual labour job over lockdown for 9 months and managed to find the energy to exercise every day after work
There’s only the gym. Not much else to do in this country. Gym or pub is the choice 😂plus everyone is expected to work all the time like slaves just to make ends meet. So it’s no surprise.
After getting everyone up and to school, commute and full days work, reverse school run, cooking dinner and cleaning up, organising homework and music practice, lifts to various clubs then I have about 2 hours in the evening I could devote to exercise. At that point exercise is the LAST thing I feel like doing.
As a single parent with a useless ex-h I can’t even go early in the morning or late in the evening as I am full time parent. I think the sector of females with school age children will be over-represented in that 50%.
1) work
2) hobbies
3) relationships
Pick 2.
Best way to get exercise is to build it into your day.
Best way to do that is to drop the car and get on a bike.
I never *ever* liked exercising.
Now I bike to work, bike to the shops, bike my toddler to places outside of walking distance, bike to see my friends, bike to the pub. 320 minutes of exercise per week is now the *minimum* amount of exercise I do.
*And I’m a very very lazy person.*
And I save a bomb on petrol/car wear/parking.
Shame this country works so hard to make this a scary and offputting proposition to most people.
I don’t do vigorous exercise, I do however walk between 7 and 9 miles a day.. idk I might get my bike out then if that doesn’t count.
I know some women who drive to the corner shop!
Everyone here blaming disproportionate childcare and home duties, although those definitely do not help _later_ in life, the drop-off in women in sport **after leaving school** is a [well-known and researched phenomenon.](https://www.wsff.org.uk/category/category/insight-and-innovation/delivering-sport/participation/drop/)
There are a series of social, structural and biological barriers from lack of coaches/resources, body-confidence, fear of judgement and genuinely just avoiding it whilst on their period (understandably).
Something like 1 in 3 Women stop sport after school, whilst it’s more like 1 in 10 for Men. There’s a thousand different ways we could possibly improve this and I find it quite fascinating.
I’m hoping that pushing Women’s professional sport more into the spotlight will help in terms of the social side, making it more acceptable and aspirational. But infrastructure and support needs to improve also to match.
Getting someone _back_ into regular sport/exercise is far more difficult than keeping them in it.
A lot of people (men and women) who currently do NO exercise are surprised at what they’re capable of once they take action and get started with any sort of exercise plan – both from a physical capability and available time standpoint.
A lot of us are guilty of not prioritising ourselves in life at all. Kids come first. Work. Partners. Pets. Friends. Family commitments. All take precedent above looking after ourselves.
When we finally get some time to ourselves, the natural inclination is to enjoy some TV, read, scroll on reddit – it can be EXTREMELY hard to go from a standing start to begin exercising… but the results can be substantial and immediate both mentally and physically once you begin.
For anyone short of time, has young children etc – a bodyweight program you can do at home can provide adequate exercise without the obstacles of trying to attend a gym/swimming pool etc.
There are plenty of beginner friendly exercises which can be progressed/regressed as necessary to accommodate your current fitness levels and any injuries or other barriers to exercise.
The main thing is to commit yourself. Put aside 20 minutes or so 3x per week to begin with. Prove to yourself you can do it. Then build from there.
I’m lucky to work each day with many women who were in the exact position described in the article. The important thing is to understand that everyone’s life, commitments and time available is different. Don’t expect too much if you don’t have it available. Start small and build up gradually. Even a short workout is better than no workout at all.
Don’t let ‘perfect’ be the enemy of ‘decent’. It’s never going to be the ideal time to start, so the next best time is as soon as possible.
The gym has always been a hobby for me, going 4 times per week and I consider myself lucky that I enjoy it that much. Bodybuilding after a hard day of work is something I’m excited for.
That said, I do have a lot of sympathy for people that consider it a chore, and with a hectic work schedule it’s not something many would look forward to over going out for a drink or watching some tv etc. I think some of it does have to come from a change of perspective, to go and purposefully do something to improve yourself. Experimenting with lots of different types of exercises and sports can help to find what you really enjoy.
I won’t pretend I know all the reasons, as I (female, mother, work full time) lift at the gym 3x a week, mountain bike around my area and go walking/hiking. However, I will say that when I talk of this to other women who either don’t exercise or express surprise that I do, I get some strange responses.
1. They are shocked and surprised that my husband ‘lets me’ go to the gym. These are ordinary, modern women in the workplace who say their partners wouldn’t approve of them attending a gym. Fucking baffled me, that one.
2. Their partners would not agree to look after their own children. Therefore the women can’t go anywhere without them. I was less shocked at this as I’ve heard it a lot. That a man is still some sort of superdad if he can look after his own kids. It’s shit but I guess that’s some people’s reality.
3. They tell me bike riding and walking alone is unsafe and I risk being murdered. I say I’d rather live my life and not stay indoors out of fear, but it does seem more common to be cautious in this regard. My mum says walking is ‘what sluts do’ but then she’s always been quite strange.
4. They do not like gyms and find them intimidating. I do not, but again I appreciate I might be the odd one out. I’ve asked for male spotters in the gym, been praised for a heavy lift, no weirdness. I find gyms quite a chill place. I will say that I find women in gyms a bit scarier than men, especially when hanging around in the changing rooms arguing on phones. I find that scarier than the main floor.
5. They don’t know how to get started. Eh, yeah I guess, but YouTube is right there. I don’t think that’s a good excuse anymore.
Because half of us are working class who work sleep repeat
The standard for required vigorous exercise is about 75 minutes a week – just over ten minutes a *day.*
The moderate exercise is 150 minutes, which is about 22 minutes a day.
Unless you’re literally bedbound, there’s no reason we should be failing as a country to reach those targets.
Anecdotal I know, but I help coach at a local gym offering kickboxing/MMA/jujitsu. We are purposely very welcoming to women and men alike; we have a female coach on the team, have several upcoming female competitors, and run weekly woman-only classes. We’d run more if we had enough interest.
On the rare occasion a male gym member has made a female member feel uncomfortable, they have been spoken to immediately and a couple of times we’ve had to permanently ban people over inappropriate messages on social media reported by our female members.
Despite our best efforts, we’ve found it is 1000 times harder to get a female participant to stick around long term than a male one. We’ve never really figured out why. They usually just don’t stay long except for a rare few. Speaking to my friends involved in running other types of fitness classes, they have also reported struggling to retain female members long term.
This is at a time in history when we have unprecedented amazing UK role models in combat sports such as Molly McCann (MMA), Ffion Davies (BJJ), Iman Barlow (Muay Thai), Terri Harper (boxing) and many more. It’s a true golden era for UK women’s combat sports, yet the male:female ratio at all levels from hobby through to amateur and professional competitions remains extremely skewed.
I would love to know how we can improve the gender balance at our club.
As another anecdote, my wife used to be a keen exerciser before marriage, we used to really enjoy doing kickboxing and fitness together most days, but one day after we got married she completely stopped working out and has never restarted. We have no children or other dependents and both work 9-5 from home. We have exercise equipment at home and there are gyms close to our house. Finances are not a major limiting factor. However, I train almost every day and she trains almost never (less than 5 times in the last 3 years). It seems like for whatever reason – innate or socialised – on average, women simply prioritise exercise much less than men do.
(Note: there are plenty of men who would benefit from more exercise too – the UK as a whole is undergoing a severe health crisis with more than 2/3rds of the population clinically overweight).
The figure isn’t much better for men either.
It’s not uncommon in 1st world countries that as you have more in your life, in terms of home, holidays, cars, TV, Phones, etc etc, then you start to lead a more sedentary lifestyle.
The UK population was actually fittest during, and just after WW2, when there was lots of manual labour to be done and we were all on rations.
We might not like the current cost of living, but compared to our fathers, fathers, we have a very sedentary lifestyle
Time is a problem for me as I’m looking after an elderly relative who’s far more fragile than I want her to be. Another one is every bit of exercise I’m able to do is really dull and more dull due to being almost blind. I need someone else for bike riding and a special bike. Have you ever seen people running with a cane? It’s interesting. Lifting weights requires a gym and it’s so dull. I can’t even put music on for a home work out because mothers practically whispering when she calls me though to get her something else thats going to mess up her sugar level. Everything I do has to be something that can be interrupted hell even everything I do for her gets interrupted by her so often it’s not funny. After the third interruption in fifteen min you kind of feel like someone’s trying to tell you that looking after yourself is a waste of time.
Yeah it shows.
I’m amazed it’s that it’s not more than half. Are some of them lying?
MORE THAN HALF OF BRITISH WOMEN DO VIGOROUS EXERCISE
It’s not a problem provided you’re eating relatively well. The problem starts when you have no self control over calorie intake and don’t care about what you eat / don’t try to avoid unhealthy food.
1 hour of running per day at a fairly brisk pace is the equivalent of half a bag of Doritos.
For most people, not eating the Doritos is the sensible option. It’s much easier to not eat the Doritos than it is to do an hour of running. From a calorie perspective, it’s the same thing.
I know Covid put limits on what could be done over the second half of 2020 and practically all of 2021 but I have exercised only 4 times since May 2020. And they weren’t true work outs as they were combined social activities and I felt obliged to chat and take it steady.
I went from being a really active single mum of one older child who also took part in my preferred sport to now being married with a baby, working an intense job that includes shift work that leaves me pretty exhausted. When I’m not exhausted my kids and husband need my attention. I can remember telling my husband that I used to do 3 hour sessions a couple of times a week and sometimes spend half a day working out. He didn’t particularly like the idea but turns out he needn’t have worried, I barely leave the house outside of work and chores.
I feel disgusting. I hate how I look and how unhealthy I am now. I have no idea how to make the time and justify the expense. I miss being fit.
I guess I just wanted to say thank you OP. I stopped going to the gym and regularly cycling a while ago when I started suffering from a few serious health conditions but have been doing better for a while. Reading this post has actually kind of inspired me and I’ve signed back up to try and get a few classes and a swim in each week. I’d avoided it due to not having enough time, being too stressed and still being a bit unwell but even with my health conditions I should still be able to swim most of the time.
Thank you, you have made a difference to this woman who was too nervous to go back to the gym and inspired her to bit the bullet and re-join!
I don’t need to do this for cardio. I just got covid & it gave me inappropriate sinus tachycardia so I can just hang up washing & get a heart rate of 120.
A lot of this stems right back from school age, to be honest. My sister’s a PE teacher at a secondary school and whilst there are obviously a decent number of girls that love sport, there are a disproportionately high number who hate exerting themselves in PE. There’s a range of reasons for it, but it can be shyness, not wanting to make mistakes, or not wanting to get sweaty in front of your classmates, and so on.
By the time you’ve left structured PE and grown up, I think most boys at school will have at least had a kick around of a football here and there during free time, but with girls you get a decent chunk of people who were never engaged, and that persists into adulthood. Obviously the “people who didn’t like sport as a kid” circle doesn’t fully overlap with adults who don’t exercise, but I’d say it’s one of the core contributors – and precisely why Sport England ran the fairly widely-praised “this girl can” campaign.
What this data shows to me is something fundamentally cultural that you can only really fix at a younger age, or by chucking a huge amount of money at the way people think about sport/exercise via awareness campaigns. It’s 50% of people doing no vigorous exercise *in the last 12 months*, which is frankly a huge length of time – and even the busiest parents in the world would be able to exercise at least once a year if they really wanted to, you’d have thought.
Wife is English and works in public health in the UK, alongside illustrious organizations (/s) like PHE, NHS, Sport England, and various NGBs of several sports.
Studies like this are nonsense. The source data is absolutely shit. There is zero budget in these orgs for mathematicians and statisticians to analyze the data, social scientists to design the right questions and methods, or data scientists/programmers to clean the data, get it into a usable form, or verify its accuracy. I know because I consult for these orgs, as a “tech expert”.
And, the implication itself–that not getting this “vigorous exercise” is somehow bad–is poor health information to begin with.
On top of that, to the extent that this information is even useful at all, UK sporting culture is weird. In the US, where I’m from, amateur sport is a big deal. Women can play in local competitive volleyball, tennis, rugby(!), climbing, or soccer–excuse me, football–leagues, or get involved with wonderful coed sports like Ultimate. Here, it’s either solo sport (go swimming) or the gym (solo workouts). Why aren’t there more competitive sporting venues, and why aren’t competitive amateur sports a bigger thing here, aside from football? Or am I just not seeing it (despite having lived here for the past 5 years)? None of my wife’s friends are engaged in sport, but some do get involved with solo workouts (gym, “yoga”, pilates). Most of my friends’ wives and girlfriends–even among the non-married, no-kids couplings–also do not compete in amateur sport. I’m from California. This is weird to me.
Anyway, getting back to it, “vigorous exercise” is not going to do anything for weight, which is, for the ***VAST MAJORITY*** of people, the biggest component of health issue.
Eat (far) less, eat better, and stop drinking.
A lot of women are bigger (size wise) then men these days.
I genuinely don’t mean that to sound rude, but it’s the honest truth.
Woman, EU citizen, who used to work in the UK. I had to work overtime (everyday) unpaid. Wait for the train and commute 1hour each way, due to rent being stupidly high living closer.
I spent my weekends freelancing, (to make our budget fit) so all exercise was walking to/from the stations.
Now I live in Denmark, work 37 hours only. Got plenty of time for hobbies and exercise. Im in the best shape in 15 years and Ive lost 20% bodyweight since I lived in the UK.
It boils entirely down to time, and not having the energy.