A study conducted by Discovery Vitality concluded that adding a 30 minute workout help fight stress and depression, especially in women.
Women’s mental health is a very crucial topic these days. Because of multiple roles they carry out ranging from doing household work, tutoring kids and their personal careers, women often experience stress and depression in their day to day life. Probability of being diagnosed with depression is twice with women as compared to men. They also cannot spare much time to workout or look after their health because of the multiple roles they have to perform. A study reported in the International Journal of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation found out that adding a workout of minimum 30 minutes or 5000 steps to their day every week may help women to reduce their depression by 19%.
The study conducted by a health insurer named as Discovery vitality examined nearly 50000 members from 2013 to 2015. The researchers then kept a track of daily exercises and gym sessions of the candidates. Depending on the duration and intensity of he workout, certain points were allocated to the members. The researchers found out that small exercise sessions such as cycling at speed of 10 km/hour or walking at speed of 5.5 km/hour or swimming at speed of 1.5 km/hour helped reduce the depression levels in women. All these workouts were performed for averagely 30 minutes by the participants of the study.
Though some studies in the past have detected mental health benefits of exercising in men also, this study did not find any such specific relationship. It was because women are more probable to get the depression than men and the sample size of the research was too small.