Similar health benefits for weekend warriors, daily exercisers: study

So much for a lazy Sunday.

Weekend warriors — people who exercise on Saturdays and Sundays — can lower their risk of developing 264 diseases just as well as people who hit the gym throughout the week, a new study finds.

“We show the potential benefits of weekend warrior activity on the risk of not only cardiovascular disease, as we have shown in the past, but future diseases spanning the entire spectrum, from conditions such as chronic kidney disease to disorders of humor and beyond.” said the co-author of the study, Dr. Shaan Khurshid, a faculty member at Massachusetts General Hospital.

For the study, nearly 90,000 UK residents wore wrist accelerometers to track their physical activity and time spent at various exercise intensities over a week.

The participants were divided into three groups – weekend warriors, regular or inactive.

The research team looked for links between activity patterns and the incidence of 678 conditions across 16 disease types, including mental health, digestive, neurological and other diseases.

Weekend warriors and regular gym goers had significantly lower risk for over 200 diseases compared to couch potatoes.

The associations were strongest for cardiometabolic conditions such as high blood pressure (23% lower risk for weekend warriors and 28% reduced risk for daily exercisers) and diabetes (43% and 46% reductions, respectively).

The results were published Thursday in the journal Circulation.

“Our findings were consistent across many different definitions of weekend warrior activity, as well as other thresholds used to categorize people as active,” Khurshid said.

He added: “Because there appear to be similar benefits for the weekend warrior versus regular activity, it may be the overall volume of activity, rather than the pattern, that matters most.”

According to the Physical Activity Guidelines for Americans, adults should aim for 150 minutes of moderate-intensity physical activity and two days of muscle strengthening per week.

“We know that 150 minutes of physical activity each week sounds like a lot, but you don’t have to do it all at once,” says the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. “It could be 30 minutes a day, five days a week. You can spread your activity throughout the week and break it into smaller chunks of time.”

Aerobic exercise has been shown to lower the risk of stroke, help maintain a healthy weight, keep bones strong, and improve mental health, among other benefits.