Find yourself with a bigger appetite on rest days than after logging your hardest workout of the week? Same. It usually takes me an hour or two to feel hunger after an intense session, and while there are plenty of existing studies that have attributed this to a decrease in the hunger hormone grehlin and an increase in the hormone peptide YY, which helps you feel fuller for longer, new research suggests women are more susceptible to this response than men.

Granted, the study was conducted on only a small sample of participants (eight males and six females), but this is the first review to have included women at all, and the findings were notable.

The method was pretty straightforward: participants were asked to fast overnight, before completing bouts of cycling at varying levels of intensity the next morning. These were then followed up with blood tests (to measure amounts of lactate) and self-reports to analyse appetite levels.

Science shows that high-intensity exercise suppresses appetite more in women than men

Results showed that the females had higher levels of total ghrelin (the hormone that makes you feel hunger) at baseline compared to the males, while they also had ‘significantly reduced levels’ of acylated (AG) ghrelin after intense exercise compared to males. Ghrelin levels were, in fact, much lower in both males and females after intense exercise compared to moderate exercise, meaning that all participants felt ‘less hungry’ after high-intensity exercise compared to after moderate exercise, but this was even more significant for women.

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‘We found that moderate intensity exercise either did not change ghrelin levels or led to a net increase,’ the study noted. The authors added that exercise above your lactate threshold may be necessary to elicit a suppression in grehlin. Lactate threshold is the point at which lactate builds up in your bloodstream faster than your body can remove it – it occurs during high-intensity exercise.

Why is this useful to know? The author of the study, Kara Anderson, PhD, says: ‘Our research suggests that high-intensity exercise may be important for appetite suppression, which can be particularly useful as part of a weight loss programme. Exercise should be thought of as a “drug”, where the “dose” should be customised based on an individual’s personal goals.’

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Bridie is Fitness Director at Women’s Health UK. She spends her days sweating over new workouts, fitness launches and the best home gym kit so you have all that you need to get fit done. Her work has been published in Stylist, Glamour, Cosmopolitan and more. She’s also a part-time yoga teacher with a habit of nodding off mid savasana (not when she’s teaching, promise).

While some of you have your healthy lifestyle down to a tee – balanced nutrition, adequate sleep and a finely tuned workout regime incorporating strength, cardio and flexibility training – others struggle to know where to start when it comes to fitness. And with Google searches for “Is 30 minutes of exercise a day enough?” spiking, it seems that many of you aren’t sure about the length of time or number of workouts to aim for weekly.

And to make matters even more confusing, knowing how often you should workout isn’t always as simple as it should be. You see, your progress will depend on a combination of factors which might seem unconnected to exercise but still have an impact. Sleep, for example, has been shown in various studies (like this one, published in the European Journal of Applied Physiology) to affect physical performance, while research also shows a bi-directional relationship between exercise and stress.

Isometric exercises, like planks or lunge holds, require holding a position for an extended period. In these positions, your muscles are firing, but you’re also working on the alignment of the joint and working the tendon to hold that position, says Wulke. Ho adds that while ligaments and joints cannot technically be trained directly like tendons, you can support their health by strengthening the surrounding muscles and encouraging proper movement patterns.

Wulke often programs training days with a mix of goals for her athletes: “high” days for muscle and strength development and “low” days focusing on alignment, isometric holds, and mobility. But most people don’t have enough time to dedicate separate days for joint-specific work. Instead, try integrating these movements into your existing strength training sessions. Consider adding a few sets of isometric holds during your warm-up or as a finisher.

(Is cracking your joints bad for you?)

During your workouts, focus on the eccentric phase of your movements. Slow down and maintain control throughout the exercise to help you ensure proper form. You can also use higher reps and lower weight to reduce the risk of overstressing connective tissues.

Last, Hinson recommends incorporating low-impact exercises such as walking, cycling, Pilates, water aquatics, and yoga. “Taking care of and improving the structures that make the joints stronger and more flexible—it really will pay huge dividends in keeping [people] out of my office and away from injury,” he says.