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If your workweek is too full for exercise, fear not, regular daily physical activities plus exercising on weekends, still provides significant benefits.
By: Theresa Sam Houghton
Bike trips, hikes, or marathon yard work sessions crammed in over your weekend may be sufficient exercise to lower your risk of disease—even if you don’t work out the rest of the week. According to a recent study, getting the recommended amount of physical activity offers significant health benefits regardless of when you do it.
The prospective study, published last month in Circulation, tracked participants over time and showed that people who engaged in most of their activity over the weekend—or “weekend warriors”—lowered their risk for cardiometabolic conditions like high blood pressure, diabetes, and obesity almost as much as people who exercised for shorter periods across several days during the week.
Patterns of the ‘Weekend Warrior’
“We have observed, and studies have shown, that concentrated activity is becoming more common,” Shaan Khurshid, co-senior author of the study and a cardiac electrophysiologist at the Telemachus and Irene Demoulas Family Foundation Center for Cardiac Arrhythmias at Massachusetts General Hospital, told The Epoch Times. He attributes the growing phenomenon to busy schedules that make it difficult to adhere to a more regular exercise routine.
To study how the change in exercise duration and frequency affects disease risk, Khurshid and his colleagues looked at data from 89,573 people who wore an activity tracker for one week and documented their activity levels in the UK Biobank, an extensive database of biological information used for research. Participants were split into three groups based on their exercise habits:
Inactive: Less than 150 minutes of activity per week
Regular activity: 150 or more minutes spread across multiple days
Weekend warrior: 150 or more minutes in one to two days
Adhering to either a regular or weekend warrior pattern provided the greatest risk reductions for more than 200 diseases and conditions, including high blood pressure, diabetes, and obesity. Based on these results, the study’s authors concluded that the total amount you exercise may be more important than how often you work out.
Khurshid told The Epoch Times that although the study’s observational design can’t provide insight into why the weekend warrior model works, it’s reasonable to infer that higher-volume exercise activates “the mechanisms we believe are at play in the associations between physical activity and health, [such as] improvements in cardiorespiratory fitness, positive effects on … insulin resistance, favorable caloric balance, and muscle mass.”
Meeting Weekly Exercise Requirements
Whether or not you’re a weekend warrior, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the American Heart Association recommend getting at least 150 minutes (3 hours) of moderate or 75 minutes (1 1/2 hours) of vigorous aerobic activity per week, along with at least two days of moderate-to-high intensity strength training.
Although it’s possible to hit the recommended amount of exercise in as little as 30 minutes a day, the World Health Organization reported that, in 2022, 31 percent of adults worldwide didn’t reach that goal.
Exercise and Disease Risk
Failing to meet exercise targets has a direct impact on the risk for lifestyle diseases, including coronary artery disease, which remains the No. 1 killer globally.
“One of the major risk factors of chronic disease is a sedentary lifestyle,” Shannon Leggett, a physical therapist and owner of Shannon Leggett Physical Therapy, told The Epoch Times. “Sixty percent of Americans are living with a chronic condition, and over 40 percent have more than one.”
Increased physical activity could be the key to mitigating this trend. According to a 2022 systematic review published in the British Journal of Sports Medicine, going from being inactive to getting just half the recommended amount of weekly activity can lower all-cause mortality and reduce the incidence of cardiovascular disease.
A study in Exercise, Sport & Movement showed that resistance training can provide additional benefits for cognitive function, weight management, and metabolic health. The CDC and the Mayo Clinic note that becoming more physically active can also enhance sleep, provide more energy, and reduce the risk of stroke and obesity.
“The reason that exercise helps us manage disease risk is because it really improves [the] body’s physiology,” says Milica McDowell, an orthopedic physical therapist and vice president of operations at Gait Happens. “It helps us not go down these paths of sedentary lifestyle, which result in problems like cardiovascular disease and diabetes.”
Is Being a ‘Weekend Warrior’ Safe?
Dr. McDowell prefers to see people break up their activity into multiple sessions throughout the week rather than try to follow a “weekend warrior” pattern. She says that the body needs cycles of work and rest to improve factors like speed and muscle strength.
“If you’re working out back-to-back days and you’re not creating rest and recovery, which is really when your body does the adaptation and gets the benefits, it’s just not going to happen,” she told The Epoch Times. “And so there are a lot of disciplines where the weekend warrior approach is just ineffective.”
Performing concentrated activity can also increase your risk of overuse injuries like sprains, stains, and stress fractures. Leggett says performing a dynamic warmup before exercising and stretching or foam rolling after a session can prevent these problems.
She also recommends “a balance of strength training, cardio, and mobility [and] flexibility training as well as some coordination and balance.”
This approach targets different muscles and ranges of motion to help you avoid repeated movements that can lead to injury.
Making Exercise More Accessible
Both Leggett and McDowell say that some movement is better than none, so if the weekend is the only time you have to exercise, they recommend taking advantage of it. Khurshid agrees, saying he sees his team’s findings as “empowering.”
“I think it allows us to say it’s really important that you get your guideline-recommended levels of physical activity … and it doesn’t matter so much how you do it as long as you do it in a way that works for you and you’re able to be consistent with it,” he says.
Regardless of schedule, McDowell encourages people to find opportunities for activity every day. She says that even just five minutes of movement can benefit bone, gut, and mental health, and it takes only 12 minutes to start seeing cardiovascular benefits.
She also uses a concept called baselining to help people increase their activity levels over time. “Baseline” is the longest period you can perform an activity before feeling fatigued, sore, or in need of extra rest.
“Once you have your baseline, then you have a better sense of what your capacity is,” she says. “And when we’re building programs for people to improve, we generally … don’t increase more than 10 to maybe 20 percent per week.”
For example, if you can walk for 30 minutes at a time this week before getting tired, try increasing your sessions to 35 minutes next week.
To start adding more movement to your lifestyle, Leggett and McDowell recommend taking practical steps to make exercise as accessible and consistent as possible, such as scheduling a set time on your calendar for workouts, pairing up with an accountability buddy or workout partner, or leaving workout equipment by the TV so you can perform a few sets while watching your favorite show.
Khurshid also says it’s important to remember that everyday movements like climbing stairs or doing chores can count toward reaching recommended activity levels. In the study, even “weekend warrior” participants got some of their activity during the week just by living their lives.
“When you wear an activity tracker, that’s tracking everything,” he says. “So it’s actually very difficult or impossible to get all of your [activity in one day] and none of it on other days.”
