September 27, 2024 – “Weekend warriors” – those that only exercise on weekends – may reap the identical health advantages as individuals who spread their workouts throughout the week.
Researchers at Massachusetts General Hospital examined health data from about 90,000 people within the United Kingdom who wore wrist accelerometers, or motion tracking devices, that recorded all of their physical activity and the timing of that activity.
People within the study, published Thursday within the Medical Journal Traffic, were categorized as weekend warriors, regular, or inactive, with inactive individuals having lower than 150 minutes per week of moderate to vigorous physical activity.
The research team examined health records for associations between physical activity and the occurrence of 678 conditions across 16 forms of illnesses, including mental health, digestive diseases, neurological diseases and other categories.
They found that individuals classified as weekend warriors or energetic had a similarly lower risk of over 200 diseases than people classified as inactive.
The advantages were particularly strong for conditions akin to hypertension, where the danger over a mean of 6 years was 23% and 28% lower for weekend exercisers and regular exercisers, respectively, and for diabetes, with the study showing a 43% and 46% lower risk, respectively. showed lower risk. However, the advantages were present in all diseases examined.
“Because there appear to be similar benefits for weekend exercisers compared to regular activity, it may be the overall volume of activity, rather than the pattern, that is most important,” co-senior creator Shaan Khurshid, MD, a college member on the Demoulas Center for Cardiac Arrhythmias at Massachusetts General Hospital, said in a Press release from Massachusetts General Hospital.
Khurshid said the advantages of weekend exercise in reducing the danger of heart and vascular problems are already known. The study shows that weekend exercise can reduce the danger of many other diseases, starting from “chronic kidney disease to mood disorders and beyond,” he said.
A study published in August Aging in nature found that weekend exercisers and regular exercisers had similarly lower risks of brain and mental illnesses akin to depression and anxiety.