Both cardiorespiratory fitness (CRF) and muscular strength are reported to decrease with age and menopause, which considered to be risk for cardiovascular diseases (CVDs). Previous relevant meta-analyses are inconclusive on the beneficial effects of exercise, particularly in post-menopausal women. In this systematic review and meta-analysis, we investigated the effects of exercise modalities on CRF and muscular strength in post-menopausal women, and identified the effective exercise type and duration.
A comprehensive search was conducted on PubMed, Web of Science, CINAHL, and Medline to identify the randomized controlled trials, which evaluated exercise effect on CRF, lower- and upper-body muscular strength, and/or handgrip strength in post-menopausal women and compared the results with control. Standardized mean differences (SMD), weighted mean differences (WMD), and 95% confidence intervals (95% CIs) were calculated using random effects models.
A total of 129 studies comprising 7,141 post-menopausal women with mean age and BMI ranging from ∼53 to 90 years and 22 to 35 kg/m2, respectively, were included in the meta-analysis. Overall, exercise training effectively increased CRF (SMD: 1.15; 95% CI: 0.87, 1.42;
Our findings suggest that exercise training is effective in increasing CRF and muscular strength in post-menopausal women, which might be cardioprotective. Both aerobic and resistance training alone or in combination increased CRF and lower-body muscular strength, but only resistance training increased upper-body strength in women.