Even a little exercise a few times a week clearly improves women’s health, informs a research presented Thursday at an American Heart Association meeting in Colorado Springs.

The research tried to examine the role of physical activity in postmenopausal women. Known as the Dose Response to Exercise in postmenopausal Women (DREW), it was first reported in 2007.

The more recent study presented in Colorado Springs involved 430 overweight or sedentary women, who were assigned to four groups. Three groups exercised at various levels, while one group did no exercise at all. One group did about 73 minutes of exercise a week, another about 135 and the third one did around 190. The exercise was divided in three or four sessions during the week.

Before beginning the experiment, participants were asked to fill out a questionnaire, regarding the quality of their life. The form included categories as vitality, social functioning, anxiety, emotional health or performing work.

By the end of the experiment, after six months, the women who had exercised the most had improved their life in seven categories out of eight. They improved their physical function and general health by 7 percent and their vitality by 16.6 percent. They gained 11.5 percent in performing work or other activities, 11.6 percent in emotional health and more than 5 percent in social functioning.

But the surprise was that even the women who had exercised merely 10 minutes a day noticed improvements, which means that even people who don’t have too much time or energy to exercise can still get results.

"The public health message is tremendous, because it provides further support for the notion that even if someone cannot exercise an hour or more daily, getting out and exercising 10 to 30 minutes per day is beneficial, too," said study co-author Angela Thompson, a research associate at Pennington Biomedical Research Center in Baton Rouge, La., according to CTV.ca.