Re:It Pays to Hire Women in Countries That Won't
by nl on Wednesday October 13, 2010 @12:15AM
(#1786053)
Yes, it is very well understood. Muscle mass has little relationship to endurance.
In endurance events (real endurance, not wimpy things like 2-3 hour marathons) women are highly competitive with men, and there is some evidence they have an advantage.
For example, in the 235km Badwater Ultramarathon, women consistently finish top 5, despite representing only 5-10% of the field.
Long distance swimming is even worse for men. Shelly Taylor-Smith has held the record for the 48km Manhattan Island swim since 1995. Women are within 28 minutes of the outright English Channel swim crossing record (6:57 vs 7:25), and based on this older swim time list, women have 9 out of the top 20 times: http://www.channelswimming.com/solo-time-HTML.htm
I'm going to resort to quoting papers to you:
"When performing certain isometric exercises, the endurance of women is almost twice that of men performing the same exercise, according to results presented at a meeting of international scientists. Both sexes performed the exercises at the same percentage of their maximum strength.
The study, conducted at the University of Colorado in the US, confirmed that women outlasted men by an average of 75 per cent and, importantly, showed that the reason women had longer endurance times was not due to differences in the motivation levels between men and women, or within the nervous system, but due to differences within muscle." http://www.mydr.com.au/sports-fitness/women-beat-men-on-musc...
"The negative slope and the X-axis intercept of this equation at 66 km supports the hypothesis that women ultramarathon runners have greater fatigue resistance than do equally trained men whose performances are superior up to the marathon distance." http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9044230
In endurance events (real endurance, not wimpy things like 2-3 hour marathons) women are highly competitive with men, and there is some evidence they have an advantage.
For example, in the 235km Badwater Ultramarathon, women consistently finish top 5, despite representing only 5-10% of the field.
Long distance swimming is even worse for men. Shelly Taylor-Smith has held the record for the 48km Manhattan Island swim since 1995. Women are within 28 minutes of the outright English Channel swim crossing record (6:57 vs 7:25), and based on this older swim time list, women have 9 out of the top 20 times: http://www.channelswimming.com/solo-time-HTML.htm
I'm going to resort to quoting papers to you:
"When performing certain isometric exercises, the endurance of women is almost twice that of men performing the same exercise, according to results presented at a meeting of international scientists. Both sexes performed the exercises at the same percentage of their maximum strength. The study, conducted at the University of Colorado in the US, confirmed that women outlasted men by an average of 75 per cent and, importantly, showed that the reason women had longer endurance times was not due to differences in the motivation levels between men and women, or within the nervous system, but due to differences within muscle." http://www.mydr.com.au/sports-fitness/women-beat-men-on-musc...
"The negative slope and the X-axis intercept of this equation at 66 km supports the hypothesis that women ultramarathon runners have greater fatigue resistance than do equally trained men whose performances are superior up to the marathon distance." http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9044230