Study Suggests Aerobics Better for Obese Adolescent Girls

Diet and exercise are both effective means for treating childhood obesity.

But how you exercise may make a significant difference for obese adolescent girls, according to a news release from the American Physiological Society.

Researchers found that aerobics is better for them than lifting weights when it comes to attacking dangerous liver fat and improving insulin sensitivity, the release states.

Those are important effects when you consider that obesity leads to diseases like metabolic syndrome, non-alcoholic fatty liver disease and type 2 diabetes – all of which were once considered adult health conditions.

The information comes at a critical time. Obesity has more than doubled in children and tripled in adolescents nationwide in the past 30 years, according to statistics from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

For the study, published in the American Journal of Physiology-Endocrinology and Metabolism, researchers followed 44 obese girls between the ages of 12 and 18. They found that the girls who did aerobics and resistance training both lost fat compared to those who did not work out at all. However, the group that only did aerobics – in 60-minute sessions on a treadmill or elliptical trainer, three times a week for three months – lost visceral and liver fat and improved their insulin sensitivity while the other groups did not.

“These findings suggest that for teen girls, aerobic exercise might be superior to resistance exercise for cutting health risks associated with obesity,” the news release states.  “They also note that, anecdotally, girls in the aerobic exercise group seemed to enjoy their workouts more than those in the resistance exercise group.”

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