'Weekend Warriors' Get Same Benefits from Exercise
If you find it hard to make time for exercise during the working week, but do a lot of exercise over the weekend or on your days off, you might be described as a "weekend warrior."
This expression is sometimes used in an impolite way to say that a person isn't committed and doesn't exercise regularly enough.
However, according to two new studies, people who do all their exercise on one or two days get similar benefits to people who exercise more regularly — if they do the same amount.
The World Health Organization recommends people do at least 150 minutes of moderate exercise or 75 minutes of vigorous exercise each week.
One study, done by researchers in China, looked at the effect of "weekend warrior" exercise on brain health.
Using data from more than 75,000 people in the UK, researchers put participants into three groups based on when they did their exercise — or if they did any at all.
The participants, with an average age of 62, were followed for an average of eight years. And the researchers found that weekend warriors reduced their risks of developing things like dementia and depression in the same way as people who exercised all week.
They said the important thing was the amount of exercise people did, not when they did it.
Researchers in the US said the same when they looked at the effect of exercise on a large number of different diseases.
The study — of almost 90,000 people, also in the UK — found that anyone who did at least 150 minutes of exercise at any time during the week reduced their risk of getting more than 200 diseases. That's compared to people who didn't get 150 minutes of exercise.
So there's nothing wrong with being a weekend warrior!
