Third, it could be a social-expectations difference in how you're supposed to talk about your fitness level

Bingo. We have a winner.

Do you think that's all of it?

All I've got is anecdotes as well. Women of my age talk more about How.Hard.It.Is., but on the other hand I have the sense women seem to be more inclined to make the effort in the first place.

Among the four couples closest to us, two of the guys are serious cyclists like me, the third guy still plays basketball regularly, and only the fourth guy is possibly less fit than his wife.

I think 4 is a big thing too. Although I wouldn't deny 3 is a part of it.

Also, most guys I know, even the ones who are sedentary now, did massively -- and I mean massively in the sense orders of magnitude -- more exercise as teenagers and in their twenties than most women I know did.

While fitness atrophies, I suspect there's a hold over from high levels of exercise earlier life. Particularly during key growth/development periods.

It just wasn't cool for girls when I was growing up to do a lot of sport or exercise a lot. While we all ran about and played as kids the girls pretty much stopped completely around puberty whereas the guys continued right on.

2: I certainly don't think so. A lot of the reason for this pattern among people I know is probably different fitness levels (reason 4, I suppose). Almost every guy I know plays at least some sports at least some of the year, so they at least have some baseline fitness (however depleted) when they get up and start running or lifting weights. I certainly know a lot more women who have never or almost never worked out regularly, and only worked out lightly when they did so. It's no real surprise that they've got a much much harder time getting up and cranking out a reasonable run.

Women in general have diets more prone to degradating their fitness capabilities. More pasta and chocolate, less steak, is the general idea. Just like smoking (though obviously not so big an effect), this tears down built-up fitness capacity and makes any gains more painful.

Also, your (3) probably plays a role.

McOwned.

2: Hard to be sure, but I don't know any guys who can go for long sedentary periods and then just decide to run a couple of miles without significant amounts of wheezing and hacking involved. I do know plenty of guys, however, who talk as if they can do so.

I was truly sedentary in college - no exercise other than hikes every couple months, nothing at all aerobic. It took me months to get the the point that I could run a few miles without stopping. Since then, even in my relatively sedentary periods I've maintained that baseline level; "out of shape" now means that I haven't had significant strenuous aerobic exercise in 10 days. From that baseline, it's easy to start again.

As a (female) friend told me when I first started running years ago, "Going from three miles to ten miles is easy. It's going from zero to three that's hard."

ttaM's 4 makes sense to me, and is in line with my personal experience and that of those close to me.

8: What do you mean by "long sedentary periods" though? I typically think in terms of 2-3 months or more, which certainly will not reduce someone to the hacking and wheezing level. Now, if you're talking about someone who's gone 2-3 years without doing any real exercise and then decides to run a couple miles, then I'm with you.

In my experience, women tend to do a lot more running, cardio and aerobics than men, and nobody does any exercise with weights at all. Therefore I have nothing to contribute.

I guess more exercise earlier in life could play a role, as 4 notes. I haven't noticed any huge exercise gaps between the genders in my cohort, though.

I really, really don't think I can buy Brock's "different diets" argument, though.

My wife is a far better natural athlete than I am, ran track and cross country in high school and college, and was fast enough that I could just stay with her when we were first together. 18 years later, she does have a harder time starting to train than I do, but she's a bit older than I am and has nagging injuries that often mess up a training program, and she still shapes up pretty fast when she gets going. I'm not sure what that adds up to. I kind of think there's something to what you're saying, but I'm not sure.

11: I'm thinking anything over about the six month threshold.

LB: I don't know. Personal anecdote ... at various times in my life I've ranged from in ridiculously good shape to ridiculously out of shape; but I haven't really run much. I have very flat feet so even with insoles it can be hard on my knees and hips to run much. So I haven't run, nearly at all, in say 15 years.

Anyway, I now live near a park with a nice softer surfaced trail round it, so I thought I'd give it a try again. Due to both injury and laziness I'd gotten quite out of shape again these last few years. So I started running around the park, which is a bit under 2.5 miles for a circuit apparantly. The first few times I had to stop and walk in the middle, then I could make it round without slowing, and within say a month I was doing the circuit in 20-25 minutes, which has to be pretty close to the 8:30 mile mentioned in the other thread unless I have the distance wrong. I've fallen off doing it again this winter, so I'll have to go out and see how badly that has affected my time. I had/have no idea what a `good' time would be; just found my self pretty rapidly to the point I was often passing slow joggers on the path, and occasionally gettting passed by a `real' runner.

Since I've never been a runner, this can't be mucsle memory. I could have some cardio built up, but it's been an inconsistent 10 years so not sure how much of that to count. I'm getting the impression you don't feel this would have been easy for you or other women you knew.

Rather than going through all that, I'm trying to perfect the sedentary lifestyle.

I think it's the testosterone. I just tried arm-wrestling our female 38 YO ex-Marine, ex-LA cop office fitness nut and we're equal. I'm just about 30 years older and my upper-body exercise consists mostly of lifting a camera or glass of Scotch, she's lifting some weights and lugging a 2.5 YO kid around.

re: 13

I don't particularly notice a huge gap now. In my 30s. In fact, I'd say among my immediate circle, the women I know do slightly more.

But from around age 13 to age 23 or 24? The difference between my male friends and my female friends? Enormous. Damn near incommensurably enormous.

I suspect 6 is mostly BS except at the extremes.... an unusually low protien diet will hurt you, but high protien isn't needed excepting fairly extreme output levels, and isn't such a good idea in general either, as I understand it. Carbs are needed for any sustained effort exercise (running, cycling, etc. often). Hence carb loading, etc.

I'm not saying Brock doesn't have a point about diet, but the summary is oversimplified to the point of being incorrect, I think.

My male friends never exercise, except two who run long distances. My female friends also never exercise, except two who do martial arts. When I go to the college gym, I see about 150 females and 10 males on cardio machines, and about 150 males and 0 females doing the weights.

last part of 20 should be read to mean: There could be a systematic diet thing going on, I don't know. But it would be a good deal more complex than presented, and I can't imagine it being anything other than a 2nd order effect.

19: It's that younger age range I was talking about, though. Huge gaps in amounts of weight training, maybe, but in the proportions of each gender that were involved in fairly intensive sports and training regimens? Not that hugely different.

re: 23

In that case, you lived in a very different world from me.

Age 13 to 16 we probably spent 3 hours a day playing soccer. More in summer. Even when we were a bit older, at the weekend we rode bikes or walked a lot. Admittedly, often we walked up a hill to find a quiet place with a good view to get stoned and drink beer, but we still walked up the hill.

99% of the girls I knew did no exercise at all beyond walking to school. Zero.

At college level I knew a few girls who were quite intensively involved with competitive sport -- but they were vastly outnumbered by the guys I knew who did regular exercise.

23: Though my own experience has been that weight training has at least some carryover to cardio fitness. Not too much, but definitely better than doing nothing. That could help the guys out since they're at least keeping some activity going.

LB, i think your definition of "fit" might be narrow, or slanted towards certain things.

running is not necessarily a good indication of overall fitness. there are others, and men & women perform differently at them. flexibility and strength in the long (core) muscles come to mind.

also, i've always thought diets abundant in fruits and vegetables were preferable to either carb or protein-heavy diets. and eating lots of animal fats is not so healthy. so Brock's thesis also seems dubious...

These fitness threads have made me realize that I still have a lingering resentment left over from grade/high school against everyone who is naturally athletic.

I hate you all.

Word to your moms, I came to drop bombs.

I remember dsquared making a comment here recently about how he just up and ran a 10k without having exercised in several months. I think that I could do the same, but that I would be crippled with shin splints the next day. If he wasn't, he must indeed be some kind of genetic freak.

I can only contribute a data point: I am a sedentary male (at least by these standards) and I find it incredibly difficult to ramp up to even a moderate fitness level. This may be, however, because I get discouraged too easily.

I don't find it so hard to believe that there could be a sexual dimorphism in cardiovascular capacity. With all that additional muscle mass comes the vascularization that goes with it, so maybe there is a trend for more cardiac power or something to push blood through all that vasculature. Anecdotally, it certainly seems like women are more likely to have problems with low blood pressure than men are. I don't really know if there's anything to this, but differences in vascularization between men and woman (as well as between individuals) certainly plays a role in things like ethanol metabolism. So, y'know, it could be.

Here's another vote for past fitness establishing a baseline that persists for years. Plus, I think males are more likely to have stopped their most recent activity more recently, eg playing hoops throughout their 20s, even casually, whereas females maybe ran in college and tapered off after graduation.

I kind of the think the gym is such an artificial environment as to be meaningless: most people on aerobic machines are trying to do aerobics, and little else; I strongly suspect that most of the guys in the weight room are doing something else active, whether outdoor running, hoops, whatever. But, outside of the gym, I think there are many fewer opportunities for casual activity by women (running, or fitness cycling, not qualifying as "casual;" a weekly game of basketball, or even tossing a ball for an hour every few weeks, do).

I'll note here that, 30 comments in, no one has proposed any physiological differences. Although it occurs to me now: don't women start to (naturally) put on post-adolescent weight sooner? Like, a guy will stay within 10% of his 20 yr old weight for 10-15 years, where a woman will exceed that within 5-10. Or is that total BS? All I have is a vague impression that college women are surprisingly thinner than their near-cohort not many years older.

Is there a difference in slowing metabolisms?

PS - I bring up weight not to rehash B's favoritest thread evar, but because it takes surprisingly few extra pounds to make aerobic exercise significantly more challenging.

Running a couple of miles a day without warming up to it is also the sort of bad idea that is gendered male. Much like killing oneself in a homebuilt helicopter.

Also, word on there being more carryover from weight training to cardio than vice versa. It's also harder to construct a mostly useless weight training workout than it is a mostly useless cardio workout.

you know, these defeatist gender threads are really getting me depressed. you can increase your own bias about certain topics by focusing on them too much, or from certain angles - remember the implicit bias researchers?

so, threadjack! here is an article abou lene hau, a woman physicist who can slow light down to the speed of cars in traffic, speed it up again, transform light into matter, and transform it back. all sorts of things that sound like superhuman powers and that the science establishment thought was impossible.

enjoy>

24: 99% of the girls I knew did no exercise at all beyond walking to school. Zero.

This has a British ring to it, for some reason.

I think it is much harder for women to incorporate exercise into their daily lives than men, if they work in offices. It starts with clothes: I could easily walk a couple of miles in what I'm wearing and sit right back down; I used to do this at lunch. The woman in the next office? It's easy to say nobody's making her wear heels, but it's never that simple.

I'm sure there's some socialization going on, but let's not dismiss testosterone so fast. There was a story in runner's world a while ago (that really made my girlfriend hate me) about a guy who underwent a full sex change including hormone treatment and went from a 37 minute 10k to a 48 minute 10k, which is an enormous difference.

She kept up her training, and her times as both a male and female were in the same age/sex percentile rank, but she just couldn't run as fast.

I have to think that the experiences of youth play a huge factor. I think if you don't know what it's like to push yourself athletically/physically, then getting started with an exercise regime will SEEM extraordinarily difficult. As hard as it is for me to get started again after a monthslong stretch of sitting on the couch, it pales in comparison to all the workouts I remember from high school when I was so sore that I covered myself in IcyHot every evening after practice.

Also, some of the fattest, most sedentary folk I know here in SF are guys, including a couple of guys who are PSYCHED that they can just call themselves bears and not even feel guilty about not working out. The straight guys, however, have no such out.

And to contribute my own anecdotal data point, I have recently been quite surprised at how quickly I have ramped up to a decent swimming workout after a long sedentary period, and a much longer period of being away from the pool. (Not that I don't have a ways to go yet).

Before a greatly-regretted leg injury (see sedentary period, above) I mostly ran for exercise, and even when I had some long off periods during grad school, I was always able to start comfortably at a couple miles, and be up to 5 by the 2nd week.
And I am by no means a natural athlete, and in a counter to the training-while-young thesis, I was a pretty sedentary thing as a kid and didn't learn to enjoy exercise until college.

I think if you don't know what it's like to push yourself athletically/physically, then getting started with an exercise regime will SEEM extraordinarily difficult.

This is huge, I agree. I've never been much of an athlete, but college crew was enough to help figure out that feeling like you're going to die after a workout doesn't actually mean anything particularly scary.

33: indeed (see above reference to leg injury)

38: I think there's something to the idea that the mental training of exercising a lot when you're young has a lot to do with it. I don't know if I'd be swimming as well now if I hadn't learned to like running and rowing in college. I hated swimming when I was on the team in high school.

I would like to thank all of you for making me feel like a slug.

33: Perhaps I don't really want to know, but what are some examples of a "mostly useless cardio workout"?

43: We call it "The Frowner."

37: You know, I'm not saying that it's impossible that the physical effects of hormonal treatments are that big. But a story about someone with a huge psychological investment in becoming female who, after hormone treatments, finds that yes, the hormone treatments have made him really just like someone born female in an objectively measurable way, is really unconvincing. It doesn't have to be consciously bogus for the runner's state of mind to cause most of the effect.

Oh, and mmf's attempted threadjack at 34 is amazing. Like, is this a put-on? amazing.

"Mostly useless cardio"? I'd say walking not long and/or not briskly enough is up there, along with lazily pedalling a stationary bike while you're engrossed in the New Yorker (you know who you are) or my all-time favorite: the be-spandexed girl (always a girl) who puts all of her weight on the handles of a stair climbing machine and then 'climbs' two inches per step. (For some reason this bothers me more than it should.)

I don't see why this isn't biology, pure and simple, a la 37.

Isn't this commesurate with the differences you see in Olympic caliber athletes? Men are stronger and faster. Why wouldn't that trickle down throughout the whole spectrum of inactivity?

I agree with 45. The new Unfogged project needs to be to abduct Asafa Powell, give him a sex change and brainwash him into thinking he was always a woman runner (being named "Asafa" will help convince him of this). Will he totally outclass the female field in Beijing? Only time and testosterone will tell.

42: Don't worry about it, Rob. Now that we're over 35, we're no longer sexually attractive anyway.

43: anything that doesn't elevate your heart rate noticeably and for a while. I mainly blame the "fat burning range" diagram. Or what 47 said.

Like, is this a put-on?

I don't know, JRoth, but for fun I just converted you into a light pulse, condensed you into matter, and fed you to a rabbit.

Isn't this commesurate with the differences you see in Olympic caliber athletes? Men are stronger and faster. Why wouldn't that trickle down throughout the whole spectrum of inactivity?

My uneducated impression is that the gap is significantly bigger among Joe and Jane Couch-Potato than among Olympic athletes.

I really do not think this is psychological or from socialization. I know tons of incredibly athletic soccer players, men and women, who have been playing since they were kids.

There's a gender gap, and it's pronounced whether everyone's in shape at the end of the season, or whether everyone's coming back from a slothful month off.

44: Surely you don't mean there's only one? I would think it would be more like the Frowner method, or the Frowner school...dare I even hope one day to have my own line of useless gyms or home exercise equipment? Maybe I could even, er, expand the concept so that a Frowner-method workout wouldn't just be useless but would be actually harmful.

And I thought I'd risen as high as I could go!

54 written before seeing 53.

55: The trick would be to come up with something with minimal exercise benefit, but a high risk of permanent injury.

I think there's a lot to be said for knowing how to work out. It takes years of really busting your ass to understand how to go to your limits. I think it's more than what LB said about ending a workout and realizing you're not *actually* going to die.

Think about the footage you've seen of marathon runners and triathletes running until their legs collapse. Now I think I've worked myself pretty hard, used to play football, lacrosse and wrestled, and am a decent runner, especially given that I don't have a runner's body. But even when I was training for a marathon and running until there were blood stains on my shoes, I could not imagine running until I literally couldn't stand.

And thinking back on wrestling, it took me years to really understand how to work. it's not something that just shows up after running on the treadmill for a couple months.

So I think that a lot of the reason women have trouble is that for the most part, they just haven't been driven to work as hard as men. That's not to say that women can't -- I know many women that are absolutely insane and make me look like a baby -- but that on average, the experience of really *liking* to be miserable for hours at a time is rarer.

57: Here's a good candidate. It guarantees you an elite clientele, too.

57: The Frowner EZ-Brake Pull-Up Bar?

After reading mmf!'s article, I'm worried that Harvard isn't pacing itself very well. Meh, so you showed how to use neutron stars to control the weather. No new tenured physicists this year.

You could have a line of weight machines where with each repetition the weight being shifted pounds you in the head or the shins, thus not only injuring the user but giving him an incentive to do the lowest weight possible.

What about an activity requiring painful workout clothing? Something expensive and constricting, so that you wouldn't be able to move much but could still pull muscles? Sort of a work-out corset, maybe? Or some kind of fancy shoe?

And if you did have a work-out corset, you'd wear it under your clothes--no benefit would be derived from sexiness.

63: Oh, Frowner.

Bits of it could jut out unattractively, and have sharp edges so it chafed.

59: I really, really hate articles like that.

Anyway, wouldn't it be simpler just to teach poor form--lifting with the low back, etc.--and let people hurt themselves the easy way?

67: But the whole point is for me to have products to market, so that I can lead a life of leisure. Or at least afford a proper personal trainer and effective workouts. "Let people hurt themselves the easy way" indeed--where's your capitalist spirit?

65: My workout corset will be an unattractive, institutional gray, and as Lizardbreath suggests, both jut out and chafe. None of this pink, lacey stuff for stern, moral workers-out.

I have to think that the experiences of youth play a huge factor. I think if you don't know what it's like to push yourself athletically/physically, then getting started with an exercise regime will SEEM extraordinarily difficult.

I think this certainly has something to do with it. The memory of how hard you had to push yourself to play competitive sports -- baseball and soccer for me, two sports which aren't what you'd call compatible, exercise-wise -- makes what you do in an hour in the gym seem like nothing. That said, there are two other factors:

1. Testosterone, from what I understand, doesn't just help you build muscles, it helps you retain them. I did ACL rehab with a (female) friend of mine who'd torn her MCL, and despite both being soccer players and doing regular weight training, she started rehab much weaker than I did (compared to where we both were before). This may be anecdotal, but at the very least, it was a point of contention (and, to her, much consternation) at the time.

2. Patriarchal bullshit compels even sedentary men to do more "peripheral" exercise than sedentary women. Men do more of the (literal) heavy-lifting in apartment-culture. (Obviously not true of people who live in houses, but who lives in houses?)

67: Anyone who considers BMX, rock climbing, SCUBA, and whitewater rafting to be among the most dangerous sports clearly hasn't looked very hard. Hell, half those things shouldn't even scare Forbes's 50-year-old-dentist-or-VP demographic.

(#2's just there because I said there were "two other factors," then wrapped them both into #1.)

wouldn't just be useless but would be actually harmful

Bear wrestling?

X-treme Urban Human-Cannonballing?

Bungee Drowning?

Hella copter skiing is wizard cocksucker.

Yeah, that list was pretty poor. I grew up with a guy who competes in rodeos as a bulldogger and his good friend is Ross Coleman (one of the nation's leading bull riders). Now THAT's dangerous. Those guys can get killed any time they come out of the chute.

OK, 68(1) is a valid point.

70: Depends where and how you do them, no? But that's only a small part of what I hate about articles. The big part is the whole stupid project of turning play into some combination of conspicuous consumption and penis-waving.

...about articles like that.

Penis-waving, that's another dangerous activity with little chance for improved fitness.

74 - Sorry, and yes, I realize that bull riding is in the article but they danced around exactly how dangerous it is, probably because their demographic is more likely to explore BASE jumping or heli skiing first.

77: Except there would be a fair amount of running associated with it, wouldn't there?

Nothing wrong with a little penis-waving. And amateur motorcycle racing has to be up there with bullriding - my experience shows more than a 0.01% but probably less than 0.1% chance of a helicopter ride per person-day of participation.

80: By "helicopter ride" do you mean "fatality"? Or am I confused here?

No, being injured badly enough to require a helicopter ride to the hospital.

Fatalities are much less common (in the three years that I raced, I think that maybe two or three people were killed at the track out of an organization of >500 people, at least one of whom may have had a heart attack before he crashed).

This is Swedish royalty day for me. While Queen Christina hunted bears with a gun like normal people, her grandnephew King Karl XII thought that wasn't exciting enough, so he hunted bears with a sharp stick.

The trick would be to come up with something with minimal exercise benefit, but a high risk of permanent injury.

That would be rock climbing, goddammit.

83: Did you read the article in The Atlantic a while back about Nick Caeucescu's bear hunting habits? Creepy stuff. But in the opposite direction of sharp sticks.

84: Free climbing! That way you avoid the moral hazard of a safety rope. Your extra motivation and stick-to-it-ness will ensure that you never slip up or fall. Besides, people who do climb with safety ropes just sit back and refuse to do the work since other climbers will do it for them.

How's that work, Frowner?

Well, the only trouble is that I'm hoping to sell equipment and make my fortune. But maybe I could just write a best-selling book about climbing without safety equipment.

Or, come to that, hunting bears with a sharp stick. I like that one too.

And you could sell the sticks. Also useful for roasting marshmallows in the pre-hunt bear-locating-and-attracting portion of the activity.

Sceptical about this hitting the gym so hard that it hurts business. Apparently it takes several years to ramp up fitness to a high level, so you may as well take it steady and do it by the book. Isn't this why heart rate monitors were invented? Sure, you have to push yourself a bit to make gains, but once you've achieved that intensity, what's to be had from pushing even harder? Depressed immunity?

As to the comparative difficulty for men and women; unless you're aiming at something competitive (and many won't be) what's the objective? If you can achieve it, you're there. I bet that almost everyone here wants better cardio fitness, and not much besides.* The only physically demanding thing I want to do on a semi-regular basis is climb hills (small mountains) and plenty of women have beaten me up a hill in the past. Hopefully no longer, but ...

* How many people here want to lift weights competitively and / or perform gymnastics?

38: This was more or less the only conclusion I could come up with to explain the differences (which seem real based on my anecdotal evidence). When you've had a Coach who hated you and made you run the gym stairs until you puked and then said, "run some more," you realize you can do (some) physical things you never thought possible. So I think to some degree it's the past knowledge/information that physical activity (if you are serious about it) often comes with extreme pain.

Of course, that's sort of unfortunate because since women have so much higher pain thresholds they can be phenomnally fit. I think maybe, in the mean, it's just hard for them to find fourth and fifth gears because no one is (or ever was) behind them yelling at them to shift up.

This is why the highly motivated gym partner (or fitness trainer for the Robin Leach set) is so prized. They help you find that gear and stay there.

When you've had a Coach who hated you and made you run the gym stairs until you puked and then said, "run some more," you realize you can do (some) physical things you never thought possible.

Unless you simply cultivate a loathing of the red-faced bastard and his fatuous catchphrases which grows into a lifelong aversion to anything that dimly reminds you of a gymnasium.

89: I would really like to do an enduro and not hour out, and would like to be able to do OK at them. Given that I haven't been riding dirt bikes since I was 10, this will require a lot of training. And based on past experience, training at a high enough level of intensity that it hurts is much more effective than just putzing around. Sadly, I lack motivation, but that's a different matter.

90: Yes. One of the weird things I noticed in swimming was the number of people who couldn't/wouldn't swim fast enough for 100 yards that they couldn't get out of the pool for a few seconds. Once you realize that you can work that hard without dying it's not a big deal, but there's a definite mental threshold to cross. I think competition helps a lot by providing an easily observed reference point.

Well, this whole set of threads supposes a shared belief that exercising 'til it hurts, pushing your limits and so on are sensible/virtuous/naturally appealing.

Me, I might sort of nudge my limits from time to time, but the more fiercely military/Spartan of the virtues fail to attract.

Carry on you others, though.

Not so much any of that as 'more effective for getting fit than not pushing your limits' and 'not actually as bad as you'd think once you get used to doing it some.'

I guess I'd go so far as to add that I'm confused by the repeated motif of "realize you can work so hard without dying"...I like achievement as much as the next lazy sarky ex-punk rocker, but I dunno...

The thing is, I like exercise, but I like it to be sort of steady and contemplative, hence the walking and biking. I tend to assume that additional health benefits of really, really pushing yourself are fairly small, but perhaps I'm wrong.

You know, I tried to run. I had never run regularly and daily until last year. After a week of two miles a day (in 30 minutes), my knees started hurting. After three weeks, they started hurting a *lot*. I had to stop. The doctors said nothing was wrong, of course.

I hate doctors.

Now I play DDR. (It's hard to get to where you're really doing cardio with it, but possible. And many, many times more entertaining than any other solo cardio exercise I know of.)

95: "health benefits" is a pretty vague term, but yeah, the longevity benefits of reaching a high level of physical conditioning are probably minimal at best. It's in doing things like up-and-running a 10k or moving all your furniture or whatever other physical feats that strenuous training is useful.

91: Actually, 'Coach' simply cured me of my overly competitive nature. Made me see that life isn't fair and that sometimes, no matter how hard you work, you aren't going to get over. Probably why I became a Legal Services attorney. Something about injustice and the powerful taking advantage of the weak. But, yeah, he was a really stupid prick.

93: I didn't mean it is sensible, or appealing, to come from a workout feeling as if you will die (that's a personal choice based on what one is trying to accomplish). I just think that formative experiences which prove you won't actually die make it easier for the person to approximate 'fitness' in a one off situation, or in the early stages of getting back into shape. I think that's what the Lizard person was curious to see us attempt to explain.

58 said: "on average, the experience of really *liking* to be miserable for hours at a time is rarer."

Maybe just edit that to "physically miserable." 'Cause otherwise I have enough martyrs on my friends and family list to prove you wrong...

Barely skimmed the thread, but here's my two cents: sedentary men who take up fitness in their thirties are more likely than women to have played a sport seriously as a youth, so their bodies remember what it was like to be in serious shape more than women's bodies do. Combine that with the retention benefits of testosterone and many men are starting with a leg up on most women.

I'd guess it's probably easier for a sedentary woman to learn how to do a split than for the average sedentary man, for a similar combination of reasons. Female hormones make ligaments more stretchy, and chances are her sport as a kid was dance or something bendy.

I'm basing this exercise is proctological extraction mostly on how difficult it is to learn a skill sport after childhood; I can practice ice skating or ballet or gymnastics as much as I want, but I didn't learn them when my brain was squishier and my growth plate was still growing.

Yeah. I'm fairly averagely fit, but I was so committedly non-athletic as a kid that I've given up on any actual sport; attempts to learn how to play games just never go anyplace. It's a shame -- something like tennis would be a nice way to get a workout, I'd think, but I've gotten nowhere trying to pick it up.

I have all sorts of issues about this, because I come from a family of natural jocks, and I never was. Reasonably strong, but no athletic skills.

I have all sorts of issues about this, because I come from a family of natural jocks, and I never was. Reasonably strong, but no athletic skills.

Next time you're all home, sweep Dr. Oop's leg.

Are you kidding? She'd snap me in two like a twig. (Well, actually, it'd be more like getting me in a headlock and then just not letting me go as she went on with whatever else she was doing.) She's six inches taller than I am and strong as an ox.

You ever see one of those nature shows about pack dynamics? Picture me cringing, with my ears flattened, as she bites me on the muzzle.

Are you kidding? She'd snap me in two like a twig.

Kidding. It was a reference to Karate Kid, and in specific to the idea of making an unfair, sneaky, and possibly permanently disabling move in order to win, with the implication that it wouldn't work.

Out of curiosity, did you catch that reference? I sometimes wonder if there is a list of movies that all guys (when banded by age) have seen and reference that women somehow managed not to see. And is there a parallel set of women's movies?

It's strange, but I seem to be a lot better a picking up sports now than I was as a kid. More coordinated and better hand-eye coordination, mostly. I'm still pretty much hopeless at most things involving balls, but I'm not nearly as klutzy as I used to be.

105: Saw it back in the '80s (actually just rented it for the kids after they started TKD, in hopes of getting the 'no, you're not learning to beat people up' point across); just missed the line.

Yeah, I guess it really isn't the seeing so much as the continued quoting over time.

102: I think the competitive nature of the sorts of exercise offered to kids is counter-productive when it comes to getting the below median in athletic talent (e.g., me) to take up some form of exercise.

I know it was that way for me. It's hard to be motivated to do something when (a) you're naturally bad at it, and (b) those who are naturally bad at it get humiliated in the process of trying to do it.

I'm so glad that no one in my family was particularly athletic. That would have made it so much worse.

105: I think it is more of a guy thing. Also, Generation Awesome is much more likely to use the Office Space quotes.

106: Maybe you only think it's easier now for the reasons described by 109.

109: Yeah, that is a question: how can you get noncompetitive or not-athletically-gifted kids to like exercise, since so much of it has to be through school and the easiest way to have kids do sports is to have teams and competition?

I'd love to know -- I think I would have enjoyed being a more athletic kid, but nothing I ever did in gym class made that more likely. (One fencing class was fun, but that was mostly because I turned out to be unexpectedly good at it, in the context of a class of kids who'd never done it before. Innate savagery can overcome a lot of clumsiness.) But I never went anywhere with it.

Hiking in actual nature with a good storyteller. I nearly killed myself playing some variant of Indiana Jones in a creek. All mountains are Mount Doom, etc.

As a kid, I wore bifocals, and wasn't encouraged in sports, so I thought of myself as unathletic.

It wasn't until a class in high school where I was made to lift weights and I couldn't bench 55 pounds more than three times, and then after six weeks of training, I could lift it 20 times and the football coach (who taught gym) was impressed that I realized my body could do things.

(I'm gonna love college, Kriston!)

So I'd say for older non-athletic/competitive kids, weight lifting is good because while there can be showing off about who can lift more, it really is just you and the iron. My sister likes climbing for a similar reason.

Not having read the thread, I'm going to say the answer here is the same as the "why can't women be aggressive without getting mean about it?" thing. I.e., lack of training. If you were a sporty kid/teenager, then sat on your ass for ten years, and then decided to go running, your body would at least know *how* to run: posture, pacing, etc. A big part of my problem with exercise of any kind is that I never learned how to do any of it, so I'm clumsy and excruciatingly self-conscious when I start out.

That said, I did start biking last week, and w00t! Am thinking of asking Mr. B. about postponing a second vehicle purchase for as long as possible, b/c I know that if I have a car, I'll be a lazy fuck, but not having one means I actually get out and get some exercise. And it's not like I don't live in biking nirvana.

More anecdotal evidence: the things I did do as a kid--swimming, horseback riding--are things I still take to easily, even if I don't have the endurance any more.

111: No, that isn't it. A goodly bit of my childhood hopelessness was just me or my brother (equally hopeless) and me.

105: I never saw The Karate Kid, and was not even aware that it was a gendered generational touchstone.

I have way more endurance now than I did as a kid, I sort of assumed this was natural. I remember trying to run from my friend Mike's house to my friend Monique's house (a distance of roughly a mile) with a couple other friends, just assuming I would be able to do it since they spoke of it as not a big deal, and not being able to run more than half of it. I walked a huge amount though, probably 4 miles on an average day. Now I can run (on a treadmill) about a mile and a quarter at about 5 mph, and I reckon I would be able to keep that up maybe twice as long if I wanted to. I don't know how this compares to my non-treadmill running ability, maybe I'll check that out when the weather turns warm. I'm with Frowner on not really being interested in pushing my physical limits on a very regular basis.

119: When I push it hard various things hurt the next day and the day after and I'm inclined to drown my sorrows in pasta and ice cream while skipping a day or seven. Very gradually increasing the speed and incline on the t'mill every few days works much better for me.

I'm happy enough it's working but I'll never like exercise for the sake of exercise. The instant they come up with good enough VR so I can be someone or someplace else while my body works out I'm buying the gadget.

I really enjoy running and paddling, and I've enjoyed ergs when I've had access. Not so much with the weights or anything else indoors.

It's important to measure improvements relative to baselines. I've tripled my capaciy for endurance exercise in a month. I've gone from being able to do 20 minutes of cardio to 60 minutes.

I wasn't even in bad shape when I started. I was your typical big city walker/diffident gym goer. Now that I'm freelancing I can go to the gym every other day and work out like I mean it.

I'm never going to be an impressive athlete relative to other physically fit people, but I'm astonished at how quickly I can improve my personal best with a little concentrated practice.

120: I remember vividly a gym I used to go to having a recumbent bicycle hooked up to a computer where you would pedal your little tank around and shoot other tanks. It was rad. I don't know if they still have them, but I'd be very surprised if there's nothing like that out there. Or even an exercise bike that plugs into your XBox or something like that.

Are the game boxes playable while on a t'mill? I find there's too much movement for comfortable reading and TV worth watching is a rare event under the best of circumstances.

Also, looking at a screen generally involves holding your head in a sub-optimal position, anyway with the treadmills at my health club and if you are my height.

I'm surprised that 97 is the only comment that even touches on of the things I think is a key difference - physiological differences especially WRT joints. Specifically, knees. In my understanding, men's knees bear wait much more efficiently (even relative to body weight) than do women's, so when you are first starting a regimen, meaning that the supporting muscles are still weak, men will tend to have less pain/stiffness/injuries, which of course make going back easier. (Of course, to disprove my own rule, I sprained something in my knee on Monday and have been a slug ever since...)

I also fully endorse the above comments about the underlying baseline gained from an athletic background.

I've only read through about 50 or so, and nobody has mentioned what I think is the most important thing.

It's 4, but it's social expectations. Women who are mostly sedentary tend to get somebody else to lift anything heavy. In general, men (unless they have a disability) are considered sissy-boys and not really men if they can't pull their weight at various day to day physical tasks. Women get a pass at weight-bearing activities in particular, and the sedentary ones usually take it.

And it turns out that it doesn't take a lot of weight bearing activity to make a huge difference in overall fitness.

I think Brock L is right about diet as well. Dieting in general tends to make you lose muscle whenever it's not paired with vigorous exercise -- especially diets too low in protein (which were very common until the low-carb fad hit).

Women are *much* more likely to diet, and much more likely to diet irresponsibly, which can kill one's metabolism and overall fitness level. The more sedentary the woman, the more likely she has been on a dozen diets trying to get down to size . Women are total suckers for the GoodGirl/BadGirl food separation.

OTOH, your typical sedentary man (hello, for about a dozen years between 25 and 37) is much more likely to think diets are for masochists and eat whatever the heck he wants. If said see-food diet includes a fair bit of meat and the occasional vegetable/fruit, it's probably much healthier for physical fitness than the canonical carrot and celery or protein shake diet.

Oh, and there's definitely a good dose of 3 in there as well.

I like Moira's point (echoed by others) too. If you've ever been through a real fitness regimen (like trying out for a team) in your life, your sense of what your body can handle is very different. More men have done that than women. So it may be that fitness levels are similar, but men are ignoring pain/tiredness levels that women who didn't play a sport seriously at some point find too alarming.

126: I'm male. I may be a freak, though.

re: 109 and 115

Team sports are the worst for non-athletic ands/or 'non-jock' kids in my experience.

I think my preference for 'combat' sports -- fencing, kickboxing*, etc. -- comes largely from the fact that if you lose you're not letting anyone else down and, if you're not ultra competitive, letting yourself down is no big deal. It's one person against one other person and there's no team element. It's a little like climbing and the other sports Cala mentions.

I played soccer for hours every day as a kid but, although I was fit, was never (relatively speaking) very good at it and always hated that if a game was really competitive there was a good chance I'd let my team mates down -- by missing an open goal, or mistiming a tackle, or any one of a million other things -- and even though I was mostly playing with friends, they'd still be pissed off. Team games can be really shitty for some people.

* in a non-serious semi-contact/light-contact way. Full contact can piss off ...

Although I think the two main theories (actual physical differences combined with having once been non-sedantary) probably adequately explain things, I did just have another interesting theory. I remember a while back somewhere on the interwebs (was it AWB?) a fascinating story about how all women learn to suck in their stomach all day every day from around age 10 on. That can't be good for aerobic exercise. I wonder if there are other ways in which women learn to modify their bodies which make exercise a bigger change than it is for men.