So much for a lazy Sunday.
“Weekend warriors” — people who cram exercise into Saturdays and Sundays — can lower their risk of developing 264 diseases just as well as people who go to the gym throughout the week, a new study finds.
“We show the potential benefits of weekend warrior activity for risk not only of cardiovascular diseases, as we’ve shown in the past, but also future diseases spanning the whole spectrum, ranging from conditions like chronic kidney disease to mood disorders and beyond,” said co-senior study author Dr. Shaan Khurshid, a Massachusetts General Hospital faculty member.
For the study, nearly 90,000 UK residents wore wrist accelerometers to track their physical activity and time spent at different exercise intensities over one week.
Participants were divided into three groups — weekend warrior, regular or inactive.
The research team looked for associations between activity patterns and incidence of 678 conditions across 16 types of diseases, including mental health, digestive, neurological and other ailments.
The weekend warriors and regular gym-goers had substantially lower risks for over 200 diseases compared to couch potatoes.
Associations were strongest for cardiometabolic conditions such as high blood pressure (23% lower risk for weekend warriors and 28% reduced risk for everyday exercisers) and diabetes (43% and 46% diminished risks, respectively).
The results were published Thursday in the journal Circulation.
“Our findings were consistent across many different definitions of weekend warrior activity, as well as other thresholds used to categorize people as active,” Khurshid said.
He added: “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.”
According to the Physical Activity Guidelines for Americans, adults should aim for 150 minutes of moderate-intensity physical activity and two days of muscle strengthening a week.
“We know 150 minutes of physical activity each week sounds like a lot, but you don’t have to do it all at once,” the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says. “It could be 30 minutes a day, 5 days a week. You can spread your activity out during the week and break it up into smaller chunks of time.”
Aerobic exercise has been shown to lower the risk of stroke, help maintain a healthy weight, keep bones strong and improve mental health, among other benefits.
