Study: Better Fitness Means Better Sex

March 9, 2005 — -- Researchers at the University of Arkansas have come up with yet another reason for pumping iron. It can make you sexy, and even improve your sexual performance.

That may not seem particularly astonishing, especially since an abundance of research shows that regular exercise improves our physical fitness and makes us feel better about ourselves, but in fact there's not a lot of scientific evidence that it has much of an effect on our sexuality, according to the researchers.

Michael Young, professor of health science at the university, learned that fact a few years ago when he was asked to talk about sex and running fitness to athletes who were going to compete in a marathon the next day.

"The organizers assumed there would be a great deal of research on the topic indicating that runners and others who were highly fit would be more attractive sexually and be better performers, and that I would be able to organize and summarize that for the attendees," Young says. "But the research just wasn't there."

So, being a good scientist, he later asked a graduate student to see if she could correct that. Tina Penhollow, a doctoral candidate, lined up 408 volunteers on the university campus to see what they could tell us about physical fitness and sexuality.

Perhaps not surprisingly, she found evidence of a link between working out and both feeling sexually attractive and increasing sexual performance, but the results were not always consistent. It doesn't seem to work as well for women as it does to men, for example.

Men, for instance, thought they were sex gods in both attractiveness and performance if they worked out every day. But only 63 percent of the females in the study rated themselves as above or much above average in attractiveness and performance if they worked out nearly every day.

Why the difference?

"Guys and girls have a difference focus," Penhollow says. Guys do it mostly to "bulk up and get bigger," she says, whereas females do it mostly for health reasons.