Is Lovemaking A Workout? Some Say Yes And Some Say No

Written by Tanya Arora  • 

Working out at the gym or home is not everyone’s cup of tea. It’s time-consuming, tiring and even boring to be honest. So, whenever a good romp between the sheets is suggested as an alternative workout, most of the gym-haters gleefully jump at the idea of having a rather raunchy calorie-burning session!

After all, making love is fun! You get to do something you really enjoy, spend quality time with your partner and even deepen your relationship further. So, if a good session of coitus can be classified as a workout, why not ‘just do it’ than spend hours at the gym, going hard on an exercise you don’t even like? Well, you’ll soon find out why.

Despite ‘sexercise’ being recommended as a way to sweat it out by truckloads of articles on the internet, the effectiveness of this activity as a workout is highly debatable. If you ask the fitness experts whether intercourse can be referred to as an ‘exercise,’ most of them would scrunch up their nose and give you a blunt ‘No’.

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So, that’s the opinion of fitness experts. What do Scientists have to say? Only they can truly reveal whether lovemaking is as good as a typical workout! To figure out if science thinks of sex as a good exercise, we did some research and came across this study that had the definitive answer to this million dollar question!

Let’s delve deeper into the study and find out if you can ditch the gym and stay in the bedroom instead.

What Science Has To Say About Sex As A Workout

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Recently, a group of Canadian scientists set out to find out once and for all if sex could replace exercising in the gym (1). To achieve their goal, they conducted a study in which 21 heterosexual couples from Montreal took part. They analyzed the number of calories each partner individually burned during an average session between the sheets, and the results they arrived at weren’t very promising.

The researchers discovered that in a single 25-minute long session of sex, men burned 101 calories on an average, while women burned 69.1 calories. These figures were then compared to the number of calories each person would burn if they spent 30 minutes on a treadmill.

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When on the treadmill, the average calories burned by each person of the two genders was way higher than a session of lovemaking. Men burned 279 calories on an average on the treadmill and women burned 213 calories. The difference in numbers is quite huge, which proves that is not as good a workout as many claim it to be. In fact, intercourse can be compared to a round of moderately paced walking. That’s pretty much the average number of calories burned into account. That’s clearly not enough to bring about noticeable changes in weight or fitness levels!

The same study also pointed out that women burned 3.1 calories per minute during sex. Now, an average copulation lasts for only 6 minutes. So, that way if you add things up, you’ll only burn about 18 calories per session. Quite negligible we’ll say.

Well, getting dirty under the sheets is a good workout if that’s the only physical activity you engage yourself in.

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Besides, lovemaking has multiple other health benefits as well! Studies show that if your heart health will improve if you have frequent bedroom moments (2). Besides, intercourse also helps in increasing the levels of serotonin in your body (3). Serotonin is a chemical that, when released, makes you feel happy and good overall (4).

One of the other prime benefits of having frequent intimate moments with your partner includes an improvement in sleep quality (5). And sound sleep is exactly what you need to burn more calories than you would be able to on a disturbed sleep cycle.

The list of the benefits doesn’t end here. Several studies have shown that having intercourse on a regular basis can help alleviate symptoms of high blood pressure, depression, and anxiety, thereby positively contributing to your health. So all in all, it does improve your health in a lot of ways, the same way as a workout would!

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However, for lovemaking to be considered as an exercise, its duration and intensity have to increase. The only way that can happen is if both partners increase their endurance so the overall session can last longer!

Endurance can be increased with the help of exercises that work the muscles in your pelvic floor. Kegels is best the exercise in this regard as it increases the flow of blood to your genitals. This can help prolong the big O as it acts as a preventive measure for premature ejaculation. Oh, and both men and women can do this exercise!

So, while a good amount of coitus may not be classified as workout per se, it still packs in plenty of health benefits that can keep you fitter in the long run!

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