If exercise takes a back seat in the working week, take heart. Cramming the recommended amount of physical activity into the weekend still has significant health benefits, research suggests.
A study of nearly 90,000 people enrolled in the UK Biobank project found that “weekend warriors” who fit a week’s worth of exercise into one or two days had a lower risk of developing more than 200 diseases compared with inactive people.
Scientists followed people’s health for years after monitoring their exercise patterns and saw reduced risks across the full spectrum of human disease, from hypertension and diabetes to mood disorders and kidney disease.
The more concentrated bouts of physical activity favoured by weekend warriors seemed as effective at reducing the risk of future disease as regular sessions spread evenly through the week, leading researchers to suspect the total amount of exercise people got was more important than how frequently they trained.
“I think this is empowering,” said Dr Shaan Khurshid, a cardiologist at Massachusetts general hospital in Boston, who led the study. “It shows that, in terms of health benefits, it’s really the volume of physical activity rather than the pattern that matters. The key is, however you are going to get that volume, do it in the way that works for you.”
The NHS recommends 150 minutes of moderate exercise or 75 minutes of vigorous exercise a week to keep healthy, with even one or two sessions a week reducing the risk of heart disease and stroke. As a rule of thumb, the border between moderate and vigorous exercise is when it becomes too difficult to finish spoken sentences while exercising.
Writing in Circulation, the researchers describe how they analysed health records of 89,573 UK Biobank volunteers who, as part of the project, had worn a device on their wrist to measure their exercise patterns for a week.
Those who managed at least 150 minutes of moderate to vigorous exercise were classed as regular exercisers if their physical activity was spread out, and weekend warriors if most of their exercise was crammed into one or two days. Those who did fewer than 150 minutes a week were classed as inactive.
In the years after wearing the exercise monitor, weekend warriors had a lower risk of 264 medical conditions compared with those deemed inactive. The regular exercisers experienced similar benefits.
The strongest effects were for cardiometabolic disorders. Compared with inactive people, the risk of hypertension was more than 20% lower in weekend warriors and regular exercisers, while the risk of diabetes was down more than 40%.
Previous studies have reported similar findings. In 2017, Gary O’Donovan, a physical activity researcher then at Loughborough University, found that weekend warriors and regular exercisers who met physical activity targets were less likely to die from cancer or cardiovascular conditions than sedentary people. Another study, in 2022, echoed the benefits.
One question that hangs over such observational studies is whether exercise is really preventing disease, or whether healthier people, who have a lower risk of disease already, simply exercise more. Both are likely to be at work. In the latest study, the researchers tried to address this by ruling out people who developed medical conditions within two years of exercise monitoring.
Khurshid said further studies were needed to explore whether concentrated bouts of exercise could help people meet physical activity targets more easily. “It might be more convenient for some people, it might increase adherence to public health interventions,” he said.
Dr Leandro Rezende, an expert in preventive medicine at the Federal University of São Paulo, who led the 2022 study into health and exercise, said: “These findings confirm that total volume matters most, regardless of the weekly frequency.
“This is good news for those trying to reach the World Health Organization guidelines and have only a few days a week to do so. However, it is important to consider that, for those who are already reaching the guidelines, increasing the frequency may help to increase the total volume of physical activity and therefore obtain further health benefits.”
