Donating blood is great. But you don’t need to give a pint to gain fitness as new research may suggest.
Women are not small men. It’s been my mantra for well over a decade. In recent years, the scientific community has been catching up and calling attention to sex differences in exercise adaptation, such as in a recent study published in the Journal of Sports Sciences.
The study, which was covered in Outside and has been the subject of myriad emails filling my inbox, is titled Marked improvements in cardiac function in postmenopausal women exposed to blood withdrawal plus endurance training. The authors state right out of the gate that mature women are “mainly unresponsive to endurance training”, so maybe they need some form of extra cardiac stress to go along with it, in this case, giving blood.
