According to psychcentral, a new research has uncovered the fact that in terms of improving body composition, women who are in their postmenopausal stage benefit from exercise more than women in their premenopausal stage
The University of Massachusetts Amherst research team presented their findings earlier this month at the 2015 annual meeting of the North American Menopause Society (NAMS). They said that body composition is a proportion of fat, bone, water, and muscle in the human body. If muscles take up less space in the body than fat, the body composition shows leanness.
Researchers found that on average, postmenopausal women have much higher body mass index (BMI), waist circumference, and percentage of body fat. Even though they respond better to exercise, unfortunately they begin in a more difficult stage of their life. For most of them, this is not great news since it is known and accepted that generally women tend to gain weight as they go through menopause.
However, the encouraging part of the study is that postmenopausal women may have more control over their body composition than premenopausal women. In fact, women in postmenopausal stage can improve their body composition by light physical activity, such as casual walking or yard work.
The study was conducted to a total of 630 premenopausal and 274 postmenopausal women. Accelerometers were used to estimate the amount of time spent in various forms of physical activity and sedentary periods. In the study it was found that, older postmenopausal women were less active than premenopausal women. They experience more sedentary time than premenopausal women. As expected, a higher total movement and physical activity with lower sedentary behavior, resulted to a lower BMI, waist circumference, and percentage of body fat .
Dr. Lisa Troy, lead author from the University of Massachusetts said that for each measure of body composition, we found that light physical activity had a greater impact in postmenopausal compared with premenopausal women. They additionally found that the sedentary behavior was more associated with waist circumference in postmenopausal women. This is an important health message because, as women go through menopause, physical changes may decrease a woman's motivation to exercise. In the study we found out that doing even a little bit of exercise may make a big difference in body composition.
