Weekend workouts can be as valuable as exercising throughout the week

You don’t need to exercise every day to be healthy. Squeezing in at least 150 minutes of moderate to vigorous activity at the weekend seems to have similar health benefits as spreading it out throughout the week.

This adds to existing evidence that “weekend warriors”, who fit their weekly physical activity into just one or two days, have a lower risk of early death than people who don’t exercise and about the same risk as those who are consistently active all week.

The World Health Organization recommends that most adults do at least 150 minutes of moderate-intensity physical activity each week, which includes brisk walking, gardening or cycling, or at least 75 minutes of vigorous activity, such as running and swimming, or a combination of both.

To investigate whether it makes a difference when people exercise, Zhi-Hao Li at Southern Medical University in Guangzhou, China, and his colleagues analysed data in the UK Biobank study on the physical activity of more than 93,000 people, aged between 37 and 73. This was recorded by wrist accelerometers, worn between 2013 and 2015. Most previous studies have relied on surveys, which can be unreliable.

Over eight years of follow-up, nearly 4000 of the participants died. The researchers found that among people who did at least 150 minutes of weekly physical activity but squashed it into one or two days, the risk of death from all causes was 32 per cent lower than it was for people who didn’t manage this level of exercise. The risk of death from cardiovascular disease was 31 per cent lower, and from cancer was 21 per cent lower.

For people who spread their activity throughout the week, the risk of death from all causes, cardiovascular disease and cancer was 26 per cent, 24 per cent and 13 per cent lower, respectively, than it was for the less active people.

This might make it seem that exercising at the weekend is better than spreading out your physical activity, but there was no statistically significant difference in the risk of death between the weekend warriors and those who were active more regularly.

“This study adds to what we know about the ‘right’ way to be active. That is, there is no single ‘right’ way,” says I-Min Lee at Harvard Medical School. “Whether one is regularly active, or whether one bunches activity over only one to two days a week, it is equally beneficial.”

All the participants lived in the UK and about 97 per cent were white, so the researchers write that additional studies that include a wider range of ethnicities are required to validate the results and make them more applicable to general populations.