Not everyone has the determination of a gym rat, and frankly, most of us aren’t as excited about working out as the few exercise enthusiasts who appear to be successful on social media. I haven’t.
But finally, there’s good news for the rest of us.
If you’ve ever thought that exercising less often would help, you might be in luck. A new study has suggested that people who exercise only on weekends may actually be smarter.
According to one study, there is indeed a “weekend warrior effect” when it comes to cognitive benefits.
Research published in the Journal of Neurobiology of Learning and Memory It seems that the reality of exercising as a “weekend warrior” has been proven.
To conduct the study, the researchers placed 48 male mice in individual cages. Some of the cages had a running wheel, while others did not.
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According to Eric W. Dolan, Reported on PsyPost researchmice were divided into three different groups. Some of the mice exercised every day for two weeks, some exercised two days a week for seven weeks, and some exercised for just two days and remained sedentary after that.
To test the mice’s cognitive abilities, the researchers administered an object location memory (OLM) test to the mice.
“The test involved placing two identical objects in a chamber and then moving one object to a new location,” Dolan said. “We measured the mice’s exploration time of new locations and calculated a discrimination index that reflects their memory performance.”
For mice, the control group consisted of mice that exercised for only two days and then experienced a sedentary period. The main study subjects here were mice that were exercised for 14 consecutive days and mice that were exercised two days a week for seven weeks.
Both the mice in the continuous exercise group and the mice that exercised twice a week showed improved cognitive function when administered the OLM test. However, the group that exercised two days a week was the only group of mice whose cognitive benefits persisted even after the subsequent sedentary period.
In other words, mice that followed the “weekend warrior” pattern had the strongest and most significant cognitive advantage of all the mice in the study.
Contrary to expectations, time spent running had no effect on cognitive function. Running longer did not result in any greater cognitive benefit.
“This suggests that exercise therapy, rather than exercise intensity, is the key factor in producing long-lasting cognitive effects,” Dolan said.
Even just exercising on the weekends has physical health benefits.
It’s great to know that you can get smarter by exercising just on the weekends. However, it is a well-known fact that most people do not exercise to increase their intelligence. Rather, they focus on the benefits to physical health.
Other research suggests that there are physical health benefits for those who practice the “weekend warrior” phenomenon.
Research published in Obesity We looked at body fat mass to determine how beneficial weekend-only exercise is. The researchers concluded that as long as you exercise for a total of 150 minutes over the weekend, you’ll get the same benefits as people who exercise more frequently.
Therefore, exercise time does not affect cognitive benefits, but it does affect physical health benefits.
When it comes to science, mice are just like humans.
Since this study supposedly found information about the human body, even though it used mice rather than actual humans, it would be easy to assume that this is far from reality. However, mice can precisely be used in place of humans in such studies.
In an article published in the Missouri Medical Journal“Mice and rats have long served as the preferred animal model species for biomedical research due to their anatomical, physiological, and genetic similarities with humans,” said Elizabeth C. Breida. ” he wrote.
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Despite the obvious differences between mice and humans, they also have considerable similarities that can be useful for scientific purposes, as in this study.
Mary-Faith Martinez is a writer with a BA in English and Journalism who covers news, psychology, lifestyle, and human interest topics.
