With the responsibilities of adulthood, free time can be a rare commodity. Many of us find ourselves asking, "I barely have time to cook dinner. How can I find time to exercise regularly during the week?" The health benefits of exercise—which include reduced risk of chronic diseases such as heart disease and dementia —can seem out of reach due to the pressures of work and life.
But a new study published in the journal Nature Aging offers some good news for people who struggle to fit regular exercise into their weekday schedules. The findings suggest " weekend warriors "—those who get most of their exercise on the weekend —may enjoy the same brain health and mental health benefits as those who exercise regularly throughout the week. What the study did The research team, from China, analyzed data from more than 75,000 people from the UK Biobank .
This is a large cohort study tracking the health of about half a million people in the United Kingdom. More than 100,000 of them wore wearable activity trackers. The average age of participants in this study was 62.
Participants provided data from wrist-worn wearable devices to track their physical activity patterns over a period of seven days. They were then categorized into three groups: "weekend warriors": people meeting the guidelines by accumulating more than 50% of their activity across one to two days (this was not necessarily Saturday and Sunday, but any one or two days of the week). The researchers followed up with par.