Who says your job leaves you no time to hit the gym? A detailed new study of U.S,physical activity patterns shows that men who work full-time whether their jobs are active or sedentary end up getting more

exercise than healthy working-age men without a job.

The new study comes from researchers at the National Institutes of Health(NIH).As part of the National

Health and Nutrition Examination Survey in, some l,800 working age adults were asked a battery of questions about their life style and work habits,and, crucially, they then agreed to wear an accelerometer-a device to measure their physical activity over the course of several days.

Those data from the provide a rare opportunity to nail down how much activity the actually does.

They show that men or women who work in active jobs do more physical activity on weekdays than men or women working in sedentary jobs, That's perhaps not surprising, but the NIH researchers suggest that it still

matters wst because of an ongoing shift in the economy toward sedentary work.

The more surprising finding is the one that compares full-time workers to people who don't work.The study shows that men with full-time jobs do more physical activity than healthy men without jobs.("Healthy

man,"in this case, were those men who said their primary reason for wst being out of work was something other than health or disability.) In fact even sedentary full time workers performed more weekday physical activity overall than the healthy non-workers.

The results looked very different for women.Women in sedentary jobs did less physical activity on weekdays than their healthy non-working peers.

So what drives the gender(?$t,9l)difference? The study looks at the patterns, and unfortunately can't provide too much detail about their causes.There could be many possible answers, including, perhaps, different abilities to pay for leisure time activities, or different attitudes about work and physical activity.It could also be that more But the NIH researchers do find evidence, they write, to suggest that, whatever causes the difference, healthy non-working women "are replacing pursuits whereas" for some reason----“non-working men generally are not" 。