Abstract
This chapter presents an evolutionary framework for understanding why there are bidirectional relationships between sex hormones and exercise and how these relationships are predicted to influence women’s behavior and health. An evolutionary perspective highlights the importance of understanding how physiology and behavior have been shaped by natural selection, in order to derive hypotheses for why and how exercise can influence sex hormones and, of particular interest for this book, why and how sex hormones can influence exercise. Natural selection operates on variability in a trait, mechanism, or behavior, to favor those that increase the likelihood of survival or reproductive success when facing recurring problems over long-term evolutionary history. Because it is very energetically costly for human females to reproduce, feedbacks between reproductive hormones and energy availability have evolved so that when energy availability is low (because of high levels of physical activity and/or low levels of dietary intake), an adaptive shift occurs, and the reproductive axis is suppressed, reflected initially in lower levels of estrogen and progesterone, and a reduced likelihood of becoming pregnant while energetic resources are lower. However, prolonged impairments of the reproductive axis may prompt an adaptive reduction in physical activity to help resume reproduction despite low energy availability. This framework also leads to theory-driven hypotheses regarding factors—such as individual conditions and cues of resource scarcity—that can predictably influence individual differences in the relationships between sex hormones and exercise.
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Caldwell, A.E., Hooper, P.L. (2023). Sex Hormones and Physical Activity in Women: An Evolutionary Framework. In: Hackney, A.C. (eds) Sex Hormones, Exercise and Women. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-21881-1_20
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