Beat the pants off your man

Muscle & Fitness/Hers, Sept-Oct, 2003 by Tabatha Elliott

In the battle between the sexes, women tend to lose more than we win when it comes to fitness. We'll probably never bench press more, sprint faster, jump higher or run longer than our male counterparts. After all, men typically have more muscle mass and a better ability to get oxygen to their muscles than we do. Yet at least one physiological component can let us excel, say Swedish researchers. They recently discovered that when women and men performed repeated bicycle sprints, the female subjects recovered faster and more completely between sprints. To take advantage of this gender difference, challenge your guy to sports that have short to moderate bouts of intense activity broken up by rest periods. You may just come out on top in the later stages of a tennis, racquetball, soccer, basketball or touch-football game when his muscles are zapped and depleted of their energy stores.

--Tabatha Elliott, PhD