Sept. 27, 2024 -- “Weekend warriors” – those who only exercise on the weekends -- may be getting the same health benefits as people who scatter their workouts throughout the week.
Researchers at Massachusetts General Hospital looked at health data for about 90,000 people in the United Kingdom who wore wrist accelerometers, or motion tracking devices, that recorded their total physical activity and when they did it.
People in the study, published Thursday in the medical journal Circulation, were categorized as weekend warrior, regular, or inactive, with inactive people recording less than 150 minutes per week of moderate-to-vigorous physical activity.
The research team examined health records for connections between physical activity and occurrences of 678 conditions across 16 types of diseases, including mental health, digestive, neurological, and other categories.
They found that people classified as weekend warrior or active had similarly lower risks for over 200 diseases compared with people classified as inactive.
The benefits were especially strong for conditions like high blood pressure, with a 23% and 28% lower risk over an average of 6 years for weekend warriors and regular exercisers, respectively, and diabetes, with the study showing a 43% and 46% lower risk, respectively. But the benefits were found among all conditions studied.
“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,” co-senior author Shaan Khurshid, MD, a faculty member in the Demoulas Center for Cardiac Arrhythmias at Massachusetts General Hospital, said in a news release from Massachusetts General Hospital.
Khurshid said the benefits of weekend exercise in lowering the risk of issues with the heart and blood vessels were already well known. The study shows weekend workouts can cut the risk of many other conditions, ranging from “chronic kidney disease to mood disorders and beyond,” he said.
A study published in August in Nature Aging found that weekend warriors and regular exercisers had a similarly lowered risk of brain and mental health conditions, such a depression and anxiety.
