Young women and girls in the US are not getting nearly enough exercise to keep them healthy, new research suggests.

Exercising daily helps to lower risks of nearly all chronic diseases and even reduce the risk of early death.

While young men not only meet but often exceed their daily suggested activity minimums, young women largely fail to meet the 150-minute-per-week standard.

A new study from Duke University found that, on the whole, women as young as 12, as old as 29 and everywhere in between are living more sedentary lifestyles than doctors recommend to maintain their health.

Girls and young women in the US are not getting to the gym often enough to meet doctors' recommendations for protecting their health, new research reveals

Your Instagram feed may be full of beautiful women in sports bras and yoga pants demonstrating their latest workout routine, but, according to the new study, there is a far higher concentration of these fit femmes online than in real life.

Exercise is trendy right now, but its benefits live up to the hype.

Making physical activity part of your daily - or at least weekly - routine has been shown time and time again to lower risks of heart disease, stroke, osteoporosis, obesity and diabetes, not to mention improving mood and stress levels.

Yet among the nearly 9,500 people surveyed by Duke University, many adolescents and young adults are missing out on these wide-ranging benefits - and women and girls are lagging furthest behind.

Women between 25 and 29 were found to be in the worst shape, with only about 37 percent of them getting sufficient exercise, according to the habits they self reported in the survey.

MINIMUM PHYSICAL ACTIVITY RECOMMENDATIONS IN THE US Published in 2008, the US government's Physical Activity Guidelines provide a baseline for how often, how long, and how hard people of various ages should work out. Children and adolescents between six and 17 need an hour a day of activity. Children need aerobic activity like running, playing, dancing and jumping rope.

Climbing trees and using playground equipment at least three days a week help to build strong bones and muscles. For adults over 18, any activity is better than no activity. The Health Department recommends everyone over 18 get at least two-and-a-half hours worth of moderately intense exercise a week.

Alternatively, half that much time spent in 'vigorous' aerobic activities is thought to come with about the same benefits.

There is currently no 'maximum' activity level and the more you exercise, the better benefits you reap. 'Moderate-intensity' workouts are less taxing, but take longer, and 'vigorous' ones are quick, but challenging. Aerobic activities like walking briskly, biking slowly, playing doubles tennis or gardening get the heart rate up less, but for longer.

For higher-intensity exercise, the government recommends swimming laps, running and hiking for half the time. Strength training has many of the same benefits as aerobic exercise - and more.

Lifting weights or doing other resistance workouts improves overall health as well as making bones and muscles more resilient.

In the US, exercises to strengthen muscles are recommended at moderate or high intensities, twice a week or more. Advertisement

The latest version of the US government's Physical Activity Guidelines (though they have not been updated since 2008) urges that children between six and 17 should get an hour of exercise a day.

Overall, children are not getting nearly enough exercise, with previous research suggesting that less than one third of high school students are sufficiently physically active.

The latest study, however, revealed that at least boys between 12 and 17 are staying fit, with 76 percent meeting the expectations of current levels.

Once adolescents shift into adulthood, metabolism slows and the windows of time we have to work out become more narrow.

In response, adults get cut a little slack in US physical activity guidelines, but still need to keep moving.

The guidelines say: 'When adults do the equivalent of 150 minutes of moderate-intensity aerobic activity each week, the benefits are substantial. These benefits include lower risk of premature death, coronary heart disease, stroke, hypertension, type 2 diabetes, and depression.'

In principle, you can reap about the same benefits from doing one minute of vigorous exercise as you could from two minutes of moderately intense activity.

Moderate exercises include walking at a brisk pace, playing doubles tennis, leisurely bicycling, ballroom dancing, water aerobics, and gardening.

If you want to kick things into a higher gear, you can take up running, swimming, singles tennis, dancing, (faster) bicycling, jumping rope and hiking.

Though it falls into another, non-aerobic category, muscle-strengthening exercise also provides benefits like bone strength, tone and retained muscle mass during weight loss.

Compared to some popular high-intensity workout regimens - like CrossFit and HIIT training - these activities are not terribly intimidating.

Yet many women seem to be finding it difficult to get these workouts in regularly.

Almost 90 percent of white boys between 12 and 17 reported at least some physical activity, and, continuing through age 25, men on average got more minutes of exercise than the guidelines suggest.

Statistics were far less encouraging among women and minorities.

Less than half of women between 18 and 24, on the other hand, said that they got any exercise during the week.

What's more, for every single age group, women lagged behind their male counterparts.

Statistics in each category were buoyed by the fact that those who worked out at all tended to work out a great deal - and they also were usually wealthier and whiter.