Are men naturally more fit than women?
Guys build muscle significantly faster, and naturally have a lower body fat % for a variety of reasons. In terms of strength, it takes a lot less for guys to build/maintain than for women. In terms of endurance, there’s a threshold at which women start having an advantage – I remember a graph in Noakes’ Lore of Running that put it between 50 & 70 miles. Not a very complete answer, but that’s the basics.
Idcoytco: “Fitness tends to be measured in ways that suit male physiology eg testing upper body strength. This can work splendidly as a means of gender discrimination.” Indeed. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Columbia_%28PSERC%29_v._BCGSEU for an example of this. The British Columbia forest ministry tried to institute a poorly designed fitness test to assess people’s suitability for firefighting. The idea was that only those that passed the test were fit enough to fight fires and so, only those that passed the test could be candidates for hiring. They tried to fire an existing female employee who couldn’t pass the test, despite her having successfully done the job for quite a while- meaning yes, the test wasn’t quite a perfect test of the ability to do the actual job.
Whoa! Muscle vs. endurance. Both involve strength. And then there’s pain threshold. Women tend to have better endurance and a higher pain threshold. This is just plain dumb (no offense to your girlfriend) because it is so stinkin’ subjective. I think being fit is being healthy and active, both mentally and physically. You can’t compare. It’s apples and oranges, turtles and chickens. It’s kind of like saying women are more attractive than men, or women are smarter than men or vice versa. What is your means to measure these attributes? Demagogue is right on. If you were to measure my fitness based on how fast I could run a mile, I’d be screwed. But measure my fitness on how well I can run a marathon and I’d beat a lot of people. Just an example.
