“Weekend Warriors” are often labelled as not being fully committed to a healthier lifestyle, but there are, of course, a myriad reasons as to why people find themselves exercising only a couple of times per week. Bogged down by work stresses or family pressures, or both, many individuals would love to add more training sessions to their weekly planner, but it often remains an incomplete goal due to perceived priorities. Others simply love to get outdoors and enjoy some fresh air when the weekend rolls around but have no interest in sweating it out on a weekday. Then, there’s the weekend warrior that puts in lofty gym, running, or cycling sessions, accruing more actual exercise minutes in less days. No matter the reasons for becoming a weekend warrior, there’s good news because a recently published weekend warrior study says you are on the right track.
Weekend warriors have a lower risk of developing more than 260 diseases in the future when compared to those who abstain completely, and in many cases the weekend warrior remains just as healthy as those who spread their workouts thinly throughout the week.
The protective effects of being a weekend warrior, defined by the experts as being someone who performs one or two moderate-to-vigorous physical activity sessions per week, may stave off a wide range of illnesses according to the study recently undertaken by Massachusetts General Hospital, ranging from heart and digestive conditions through to mental and neurological ailments.
How was the Weekend Warrior study carried out?
With current guidelines recommending at least 150 minutes of moderate-to-physical exercise each week, experts looked at the data of almost 90,000 individuals in the UK Biobank and recorded their exercise patterns and subsequent health outcomes. Do those who exercise for 30 minutes most days become at less risk than those who stack their minutes into fewer sessions? The team looked for links between physical activity and the frequency and duration of sessions to determine a relationship across 16 categories.
What were the results?
“Physical activity is known to affect risk of many diseases,” commented co-senior author Shaan Khurshid, MD, MPH, a faculty member in the Demoulas Center for Cardiac Arrhythmias at Massachusetts General Hospital. “Here, 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.”
The results showed weekend warrior type activity was associated with a significantly lower risk across 200 diseases compared with inactivity. “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 Khurshid. To put that in terms of numbers, weekend warriors and regular exercisers were associated with a 23-28% risk of hypertension and a 43-46% risk of diabetes. These results make for an encouraging
message because they seem to show that quality rather than quantity is the key to great conditioning. To take things further, the researchers now want to drill down further to find the sweet sport for how long and often the optimum weekly schedule should look. “Future interventions testing the effectiveness of concentrated activity to improve public health are warranted, and patients should be encouraged to engage in guideline-adherent physical activity using any pattern that may work best for them,” said Khurshid.