There’s good news for people who have trouble fitting regular exercise into their busy workweek. “Weekend warrior” workouts are just as beneficial as daily exercise for a person’s overall health, according to a new study.
People who get all of their recommended weekly exercise in one or two days are nearly as healthy as those who spread their workouts more evenly throughout the week, researchers reported in the Sept. 26 issue of the journal Circulation .
Both groups had a similarly lower risk of developing more than 200 possible diseases in 16 categories, ranging from heart and digestive conditions to mental health and brain diseases, the researchers found.
“Because there appear to be similar benefits for weekend warriors compared with regular activity, it may be the total volume of activity, rather than the pattern, that matters most,” said co-lead investigator Dr. Shaan Khurshid, a cardiologist at the Massachusetts General Hospital Cardiac Arrhythmia Center.
The guidelines recommend at least 150 minutes of moderate to vigorous physical activity each week , the researchers noted in background notes.
But how a person gets those minutes each week remains an open question. Is it best to get 20 to 30 minutes of exercise a day, or can a person pack all that physical activity into a couple of days and go longer between workouts?
For this study, researchers analyzed data from nearly 90,000 participants in the UK Biobank , an ongoing health research project in the United Kingdom. Participants wore wrist-worn devices that recorded their total physical activity for a week.
Researchers classified participants as weekend warriors, regular exercisers or inactive, based on whether and how they got their 150 minutes of weekly exercise.
Both weekend warrior and regular physical activity patterns were associated with substantially lower risks of 264 different diseases, compared with inactivity, the results show.
For example, regular exercise and the weekend warrior were associated with a 23 and 28 percent lower risk of high blood pressure, respectively, and a 43 and 46 percent lower risk of diabetes.
“The results suggest that physical activity is broadly beneficial in reducing the risk of future diseases, particularly cardiometabolic conditions,” Khurshid said in a hospital news release. “Patients should be encouraged to engage in physical activity that adheres to the guidelines using whatever pattern may work best for them.”