In fact, their hearts were just as healthy as those who exercised more evenly throughout the week.
The weekend warriors in the study suffered fewer injuries than other exercisers.
The results overturn widely held beliefs about weekend warriors and whether their exercise habits are safe and effective. It also provides the helpful message that it’s appropriate to exercise whenever you can or want to exercise, even if it’s just on Saturday.
What is a weekend warrior?
The common concept of a weekend warrior is someone who works up a sweat on Saturday and Sunday by playing long hours of tennis, basketball, or jogging, then limps back to work on Monday nursing sore muscles and joints. It is usually male.
At first glance, this weekend-long approach to exercise seems reckless and unlikely to contribute to your health as much as more consistent training.
But science doesn’t necessarily support that perception.Several Past research and scientific reviews Weekend warriors suggest that you reap tremendous health benefits from a compressed exercise routine.
in research Last year at JAMA Internal Medicine.For example, researchers used data from a large government survey of the health of more than 350,000 men and women to find that those who met standard exercise guidelines and exercised at least 150 minutes a week died. showed that it is much less likely to It was more premature than those who didn’t.
It didn’t matter whether exercisers worked out many times a week or only once or twice a week. This is the scientific definition of a weekend warrior. You can exercise for many days or several days as long as you meet the criteria in the exercise guidelines. There was no difference in their lifespans.
weekend warriors are healthy
However, this study and most other past studies on weekend warriors rely on people’s memories of how often and when they exercise, which is notoriously unreliable. They also focus on how long people live, which is obviously an important outcome for those of us who want to live out our golden years for a long time.
However, longevity can be influenced by so many factors, including income, mental health, nutrition, weight, social networks, luck, and genetics, and the role of exercise patterns needs to be elucidated and interpreted. That’s difficult.
So, for new research, Published in JAMA this summerResearchers at Harvard University and other institutions decided to focus on the more specific question of whether weekend warriors can reap similar heart health benefits as people who space their exercise routines. did.
They first collected data from the UK Biobank, which stores a wealth of health information on hundreds of thousands of British adults. Many of them wore activity trackers for a week to objectively measure their movements.
Scientists extracted records from 89,573 people, most of whom were in their 60s, and about half were women. After analyzing their activity data, researchers categorized them by whether they met exercise guidelines and whether they worked out many days of the week or primarily worked out one or two days a week. They were classified as weekend warriors.
Fewer weekend warrior injuries
Finally, people’s health records were checked for diagnoses of heart disease, such as heart attack, atrial fibrillation, and stroke.
Overall, the group was found to be very active, with approximately 66% meeting exercise guidelines, according to activity trackers. Even more surprising, the majority of exercisers were weekend warriors, concentrating most of their activities on just one or two days.
Most importantly, people who exercise have a much lower risk of heart disease than men and women who don’t meet exercise guidelines, and whether you’re a weekend warrior or not, your risk is nearly It was the same.
“Our findings demonstrate that physical activity is important for heart disease risk,” said Shaan Khurshid, staff electrophysiologist at Massachusetts General Hospital, lecturer at Harvard Medical School, and lead author of the paper. “This suggests that it is the total amount of physical activity rather than the pattern.” New study.
Remarkably, weekend warriors also don’t seem to get injured any more frequently than other people, based on available biobank data. Weekend warriors and other people who exercised had significantly lower rates of serious muscle and bone injuries than those who rarely exercised.
However, Khurshid pointed out that mild pain and tightness do not show up in this data. People who exercise, whether on the weekend or any other day, should warm up thoroughly before training and slow down or stop if they feel pain.
This study also has other limitations. Because this is a link, it does not directly prove that exercise affects the heart, only that the two are related. The researchers also tried to control for issues such as people’s income and diet, which may have been as fundamental to heart risk as exercise habits, if not more so.
But overall, the study says, “If you have a busy schedule and can’t be active most days, try to be active on the days you can.” “Everything matters.”
Have fitness questions? Email [email protected] I may answer your question in a future column.
