Monitored heart rate and blood pressure during standard treadmill exercise tests and during sexual activity with a familiar partner at home, concluding with vaginal intercourse and male orgasm were compared.
The treadmill proved more strenuous. On an intensity scale of 1 to 5: men evaluated treadmill exercise as 4.6 and sex as 2.7.
In addition, it is even less strenuous for women in terms of heart rate, blood pressure, and perceived intensity of exertion.
Men seem to spend more energy thinking and talking about sex than on the act itself.
During sexual intercourse, a man’s heart rate rarely gets above 130 beats a minute, and systolic blood pressure nearly always stays under 170.
Average sexual activity ranks as mild to moderate in terms of exercise intensity.
Oxygen consumption during sexual activity: about 3.5 METS (metabolic equivalents), which is about the same as doing the foxtrot, raking leaves, or playing ping pong.
Sex burns about five calories a minute; about the same as walking the course to play golf.
Both mental excitement and physical exercise increase adrenaline levels and can trigger heart attacks and arrhythmias, abnormalities of the heart’s pumping rhythm.
Such events are very uncommon, at least during conventional sex with a familiar partner.
Fewer than one of every 100 heart attacks is related to sexual activity, and for fatal arrhythmias the rate is just one in 200.
For a healthy 50-year-old man, the risk of having a heart attack in any given hour is about one in a million; sex doubles the risk, but it’s still just two in a million.
For men with heart disease, the risk is 10 times higher, but even for them, the chance of suffering a heart attack during sex is just 20 in a million.
Biology has provided protection for men with heart disease because many of the things that cause heart disease, such as smoking, diabetes, high blood pressure, and abnormal cholesterol levels, also cause erectile dysfunction.
About 70% of men with erectile dysfunction (ED) respond to the ED pills well enough to enable sexual intercourse.
For all men the best way to keep sex safe is to stay in shape by avoiding tobacco, exercising regularly, eating a good diet, staying lean, and avoiding too much alcohol.
Sex counts as physical activity and sometimes even reaches the level of moderate exercise, but cannot replace other kinds of exercises.
The average sex act at about six minutes.
Fewer than half of married people in their 30s, 40s, and 50s report having sex more than two or three times a week.
Sex doesn’t burn as much energy as a non-horizontal workout for most people, either.
Sex burns 100 to 200 calories per session is more overstatement than science.
Most men burn about four calories per minute having sex, compared to more than twice that while jogging.
Sex occasionally reaches the level of moderate exertion.
Studies have found that the average length of intercourse for straight couples lasts between 5.4 and 9 minutes.
The entire sexual encounters between straight couples lasting an average of 19 minutes.
Lesbian partners spend significantly longer durations on individual sexual encounters than men and women in mixed-sex or male same-sex relationships.
Hormones released during sex, after sex, or from an orgasm include: prolactin, oxytocin, epinephrine, dopamine, testosterone, serotonin.”