Between work, commuting, bringing kids to and from school, cooking and cleaning, it can be hard to squeeze in an hour for a run or hit the gym in midweek.
But becoming a so-called “weekend warrior” – training on Saturday morning or Sunday afternoon because those are the only windows to do so – does not mean playing catch-up after a week sitting at a desk or behind the wheel.
“You don’t need to exercise every day to stay healthy.
“As long as you get 150 minutes of moderate to vigorous physical activity per week – whether packed into one or two days or spread out – you can significantly reduce your risk of dying from cardiovascular disease, cancer or other causes,” said Associate Professor Dr Li Zhi-Hao of Southern Medical University in Guangzhou, China.
He was part of a team that looked at UK Biobank data taken from wrist accelerometers worn by around 93,000 people.
“This message is encouraging news for busy people who struggle to fit in daily workouts, but can manage a concentrated burst of activity on weekends or over a couple of days,” he added.
Assoc Prof Li said that his team’s research, which was published in the Journal Of The American Heart Association, dug up “reassuring evidence that even sporadic physical activity can have lasting health benefits”.
“No significant differences in the risk of death surfaced between the weekend warrior versus the active regular group,” the researchers say.
“Many people struggle to fit in daily exercise during the workweek; however, this research shows that even if you can only be active on the weekends, you can still gain meaningful health benefits,” says American Heart Association Physical Activity Science Committee member and exercise physiologist Assoc Prof Dr Keith Diaz.
The main difference, he says, is that ramming two-and-a-half hours of exercise in over a weekend leaves a body at possibly greater risk of injury than if the duration is spread throughout the week, meaning that “proper warm-ups” are a must.
Previous tests have indicated that keeping weekends for workouts could be just as good as other schedules, with a Massachusetts General Hospital team in the United States finding going hard on Saturday and Sunday to be “associated with similarly lower risks of heart disease and stroke compared with more evenly distributed exercise”. – dpa
