There’s good news for folks who struggle to fit regular exercise into their busy workweek.

“Weekend warrior” workouts are just as beneficial as daily exercise to a person’s overall health, a new study says.

People who get all their weekly recommended exercise in one or two days are about as healthy as those who spread their workouts more evenly throughout the week, researchers reported Sept. 26 in the journal Circulation.

Both groups had a similarly lower risk of developing more than 200 possible diseases across 16 categories, ranging from heart and digestive conditions to mental health and brain illnesses, researchers found.

“Because there appears to be similar benefits for weekend warrior versus regular activity, it may be the total volume of activity, rather than the pattern, that matters most,” said co-senior researcher Dr. Shaan Khurshid, a cardiologist with the Massachusetts General Hospital’s Center for Cardiac Arrhythmias.

Guidelines recommend at least 150 minutes of moderate-to-vigorous physical activity each week, researchers said in background notes.

But how a person gets those minutes each week has remained an open question. Is it better to perform 20 to 30 minutes of exercise daily, 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 on nearly 90,000 participants in the UK Biobank, an ongoing health research project in the United Kingdom. The participants wore wrist devices that recorded their total physical activity during one week.

Researchers categorized the participants as either weekend warriors, steady exercisers or inactive, based on whether and how they got their 150 minutes of weekly exercise.

Both the weekend warrior and regular physical activity patterns were associated with substantially lower risks of 264 different diseases, compared to inactivity, results show.

For example, weekend warrior and regular exercise were associated with 23% and 28% lower risk of high blood pressure, respectively, and a 43% and 46% lower risk of diabetes.

“The results suggest that physical activity is broadly beneficial for lowering the risk of future diseases, especially cardiometabolic conditions,” Khurshid said in a hospital news release. “Patients should be encouraged to engage in guideline-adherent physical activity using any pattern that may work best for them.”

More information

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has more on physical activity guidelines.

SOURCE: Mass General Brigham, news release, Sept. 26, 2024

Source: HealthDay

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