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- As far back as the 1950s, couples have been asked to strap on monitors, blood-pressure cuffs, oxygen masks and other paraphernalia and copulate, to scientifically quantify the impacts of sex. The focus is often on whether sex can kill you by precipitating a heart attack. Happily, these studies generally show that heart rates rise during intercourse, but tolerably. In a 2008 study, middle-aged subjects’ heart rates jumped at the point of orgasm by only 21 beats per minute in men and 19 in women, about the same response as if they’d just done a few jumping jacks. The risk for sex-related cardiac arrest is, in fact, vanishingly small, statistics show, though it may be greater when the act is extramarital.
The issue of sex as exercise, however, has remained largely unexplored. “There are these myths,” including that sex burns at least 100 calories per session, said Antony D. Karelis, a professor of exercise science at the University of Quebec at Montreal who undertook a study, published in PLOS One in October, to look at how much energy is actually exerted during sex. “But nobody had tested” those assumptions.