Research shows that training on the weekend not only provides physical benefits comparable to those of regular training, but is also just as good for your brain.
Research has previously shown that exercise is associated with better brain health and a lower risk of dementia in old age.
Now a study of more than 10,000 people has found that both ‘weekend warriors’ – people who exercised just once or twice a week – and those who exercised more regularly showed a reduction in the risk of mild dementia compared to inactive persons.
“I think our study is even more good news for busy people around the world,” says Dr. Gary O’Donovan. “This is our latest Weekend Warrior study and it is now becoming increasingly clear that the benefits of exercising once or twice a week are virtually the same as exercising more often.”
The ‘weekend warrior’ pattern of physical activity has become a popular research topic. A study led by Dr. Shaan Khurshid of Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston found, among other things, that those who fit a week’s worth of exercise into one or two days have a lower risk of developing more than 200 diseases compared to inactive people, with regular exercisers experiencing similar benefits.
Research shows that intermittent exercise can also provide brain benefits.
“This is the first longitudinal study to show that the weekend warrior’s physical activity pattern is also good for mental health,” said O’Donovan.
Writing in the British Journal of Sports MedicineO’Donovan and colleagues report how they analyzed data from the Mexico City Prospective Study, a research project that surveyed individuals aged 35 and older for the first time between 1998 and 2004, and for a second time between 2015 and 2019.
The results of the first survey showed that 79.2% of the 10,033 participants reported not participating in sports or exercise, 7.2% were ‘weekend warriors’ who reported exercising once or twice a week, and 13.6% more often did exercise.
In the second survey, participants were screened for cognitive impairment and dementia. The results show that 26% of those who reported no sport or exercise in the first survey met criteria for mild dementia when the traditional threshold was used, compared to 14% of weekend warriors and 18.5% of the regularly active group.
Further analysis, which took into account factors such as age, gender, education, income, smoking and body mass index, found that the weekend warrior group had a 25% lower risk of mild dementia compared to the inactive group, while the regularly active group had an 11% lower risk.
The team estimated that 13% of cases of mild dementia would be eliminated if all middle-aged adults exercised or exercised at least once or twice a week.
Although O’Donovan said it was not clear why the weekend warrior group had a lower risk of mild dementia than those who exercised more regularly, he said this could be down to the nature of the screening tool, stressing that it was not clinical diagnosis. . The team noted that the two active groups showed a similar risk reduction compared to the inactive group when a different screening tool threshold was used.
Khurshid, who was not involved in the study, welcomed the research, noting that while it relied on self-reported exercise which is subject to error, it supported the idea that individuals should get their physical activity in a way that works for them.
“It adds to the growing body of evidence that concentrated physical activity is associated with beneficial health outcomes, and in this case it adds cognitive impairment to the list,” he said.
Khurshid said previous research had highlighted that it was the total amount of exercise, not the pattern, that mattered most for disease risk.
“So you need to train longer with fewer sessions per week if you want to be a weekend warrior so you still get the recommended activity volumes,” he said.