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Endurance advantage1/8/2024 Cara Ocobock, CC BY-ND Women in the past likely did everything men didįorget the Flintstones’ nuclear family with a stay-at-home wife. Thanks to this hormone, females incur less damage during exercise and are therefore capable of faster recovery.Ī variety of physiological differences add up to an advantage for women in endurance activities. Estrogen also stabilizes cell membranes that might otherwise be damaged or rupture due to the stress of exercise. Estrogen limits this response, which would otherwise inhibit recovery. Intense exercise or heat exposure can be stressful for the body, eliciting an inflammatory response via the release of heat shock proteins. Doing the same intense exercise, females burn 70% more fats than males do, and unsurprisingly, are less likely to fatigue.Įstrogen also appears to be important for post-exercise recovery. They’re not particularly powerful, but they take awhile to fatigue – unlike the powerful type II fibers that males have more of but that tire rapidly. These are slow oxidative muscle fibers that prefer to metabolize fats. In addition to their estrogen advantage, females have a greater proportion of type I muscle fibers relative to males. So, fat provides more bang for the buck overall, and the slow burn provides sustained energy over longer periods of time, which can delay fatigue during endurance activities like running. And it takes longer to metabolize fats than carbs. First, fat has more than twice the calories per gram as carbohydrates do. Cara Ocobock, CC BY-NDĮstrogen signals the body to burn more fat – beneficial during endurance activity for two key reasons. The hormone estrogen has multiple effects throughout the body and plays a role in people regardless of sex. The greater concentrations of estrogen that females tend to have in their bodies likely confer an endurance advantage – an ability to exercise for a longer period of time without becoming exhausted. As such, estrogen, in its many forms and pervasive functions, seems necessary for life among both females and males.Įstrogen influences athletic performance, particularly endurance performance. The testosterone receptor originated as a duplicate of the estrogen receptor and is only about half as old. It predates the existence of sexual reproduction involving egg and sperm. But estrogen – technically the estrogen receptor – is deeply ancient, originating somewhere between 1.2 billion and 600 million years ago. Testosterone often gets all the credit when it comes to athletic success. On average, females have more estrogen and males more testosterone, though there is a great deal of variation and overlap. But a number of female-associated features, which provide an endurance advantage, tell a different story.Īll human bodies, regardless of sex, have and need both the hormones estrogen and testosterone. One of the key arguments put forth by “Man the Hunter” proponents is that females would not have been physically capable of taking part in the long, arduous hunts of our evolutionary past. We use the terms female and male when discussing the physiological and anatomical evidence, as this is what the research literature tends to use. Social gender, too, is not a binary category. We recognize that biological sex can be defined using multiple characteristics, including chromosomes, genitalia and hormones, each of which exists on a spectrum. The story is written in human bodies, now and in the past. The actual evidence speaks for itself, though: Gendered labor roles did not exist in the Paleolithic era, which lasted from 3.3 million years ago until 12,000 years ago. It’s not uncommon for scientists like us – who attempt to include the contributions of all individuals, regardless of sex and gender, in reconstructions of our evolutionary past – to be accused of rewriting the past to fulfill a politically correct, woke agenda. Sarah studies Neanderthal and early modern human health, and excavates at their archaeological sites. Cara specializes in the physiology of humans living in extreme conditions, using her research to reconstruct how our ancestors may have adapted to different climates. There is a growing body of physiological, anatomical, ethnographic and archaeological evidence to suggest that not only did women hunt in our evolutionary past, but they may well have been better suited for such an endurance-dependent activity.
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