A busy lifestyle does not always allow for distributing physical exercise regularly throughout the week. However, recent research suggests there is no reason to be discouraged: Doing physical activity on the weekend can be just as beneficial for health.
A study carried out with almost 90,000 participants of the Biobank project of the United Kingdom found that the so-called “weekend warriors”, people who concentrate their physical activity on one or two days a week, had a significantly lower risk of developing more than 200 diseases compared to inactive individuals.
This analysis, published in Circulationfollowed participants over the years after monitoring their exercise patterns and showed that health benefits extended across a broad spectrum of human diseasesfrom cardiometabolic problems such as hypertension and diabetes, to mood disorders and kidney diseases, according to the British media Guardian.
The results of the Biobank study highlight that the amount of physical activity performed is more important than the frequency with which it is performed. Both “weekend warriors” and those who spread their exercise sessions throughout the week show reduced risks of developing diseases.
However, the total recommended volume of physical activity should be kept in mind: according to UK National Health Service (NHS) guidelines, is at least 150 minutes of moderate exercise or 75 minutes of vigorous activity per week.
The research found that, compared to inactive people, those who exercised regularly and those who concentrated their physical activity on one or two days had a more than 20% reduction in the risk of hypertension and more than 40% in the risk of diabetes.
These beneficial effects were also observed in other types of diseases, leading the researchers to conclude that what is crucial is achieving the total recommended volume of exercise, regardless of the weekly pattern.
“It’s really the volume of physical activity rather than the pattern that matters. The key is, regardless of how you’re going to get that volume, do it in a way that works for you,” said Dr. Shaan Khurshidcardiologist Massachusetts General Hospital and lead author of the study, in The Guardian.
Despite the promising results of the research, one of the open questions is whether exercise really prevents diseases or, on the other hand, People who are already in better health tend to exercise more.
In observational studies like this, it’s difficult to determine the exact cause: It may be that those who are healthier to begin with are more likely to be physically active.
To address this question, researchers They tried to exclude those participants who developed a disease in the following two years to monitor their physical activity, but recognize that more research is still needed to confirm these findings and establish a more precise relationship between exercise and disease prevention.
From a public health perspective, the study results suggest that a more flexible approach to recommending physical activity could be explored. Although regular exercise sessions distributed throughout the week were traditionally promoted, New evidence could help design more convenient and accessible interventions for different groups of people.
Khurshid suggests that more research is needed to evaluate whether concentrating physical exercise over the weekend is an effective strategy to make it easier for more people to meet activity goals. “It might be more convenient for some people, pcould increase adherence to public health interventionsKhurshid stated.