Revealed: How Often You Need to Exercise to Beat 200 Diseases, Study Finds
Don’t have enough time to exercise during the week?
Researchers have found that you can reap the health benefits of exercise if you save the gym until the weekend.
Data collected from fitness trackers worn by more than 89,000 people showed that people who set aside the NHS-recommended 150 weekly active minutes for the weekend reduced their risk of 264 diseases.
According to American experts, so-called ‘weekend warriors’ are 43 percent less likely to develop diabetes and 23 percent less likely to develop high blood pressure than inactive people.
According to Dr. Shaan Khurshid, a researcher at Massachusetts General Hospital and co-author of the study, the findings suggest that it’s the total amount of activity that matters, rather than the pattern.
US researchers tracked data from 89,000 fitness trackers to determine wearers’ risk of developing hundreds of diseases over the next six years.
For the study, a team from Massachusetts General Hospital analyzed the physical activity of 89,573 people from the United Kingdom who wore fitness trackers for a week.
Participants’ physical activity patterns were categorised as weekend exerciser, regular or inactive, using the NHS guideline of 150 minutes per week of moderate to vigorous physical activity.
The team then looked for associations between training patterns and the incidence of 678 conditions across 16 disease types, including mental health, digestive and cardiovascular disease, over a six-year period.
One-third of participants were classified as inactive, meaning they did less than 150 minutes (2.5 hours) of moderate-to-vigorous physical activity per week.
A quarter were regularly active, meaning they did at least the same amount of exercise of a similar intensity over a week.
The remainder, 42 percent, were “weekend warriors” who saved their workouts for the weekend.
The results showed that both activity patterns were associated with significant reductions in life-threatening illnesses.
Researchers found that exercising on the weekend can reduce the risk of 264 diseases compared to not exercising at all.
Compared with the inactive group, people who exercised during the week were 35 percent less likely to have a heart attack in the next six years, compared with 27 percent for the “weekend warriors.”
In addition, “weekend warriors” had a lower risk of heart failure, stroke and fatal heart rhythm disturbances than normally active people.
People who exercised on weekends had a 38 percent chance of heart failure, compared with 36 percent in people who were regularly active.
For strokes, there was a 21 percent reduction in risk, compared to 17 percent.
However, previous studies have shown that it is a challenge to get enough exercise during the weekend.
According to the 2017 report of the According to the American Cancer Society, people with lower incomes fail to get the 150 minutes of weekend exercise recommended by experts because their favorite workout isn’t intense enough.
The researchers found that the only weekend athletes who can meet their weekly training needs are wealthy, perhaps because they can cover the sky-high costs of high-intensity training programs like CrossFit.