Weekend warriors – people who pack most of their physical activity into one or two days – may gain the same health-protective benefits as people who exercise throughout the week, as long as they get the recommended amount, new research finds. The study found regardless of whether people concentrated their 150 minutes of moderate to vigorous physical activity over a short period of time or stretched it out over the week, the risk fell for more than 200 diseases over the next six years, with the strongest associations found among cardiometabolic conditions such as high blood pressure and diabetes. The findings were published Thursday in the American Heart Association journal Circulation and presented at the German Cardiac Society's Heart Days conference in Hamburg.
"The bottom line is that it's really the total volume of physical activity, rather than the pattern, that matters," said Dr. Shaan Khurshid, the study's co-senior author and a cardiac electrophysiologist at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston. "The important thing is that you get your recommended levels of physical activity.
If one to two days a week works for you, you're still going to get that benefit." Physical activity has been shown to reduce the risk of cardiovascular and other diseases. Federal physical activity guidelines recommend adults engage in at least 150 minutes of moderate-intensity physical activity or 75 minutes of vigorous-intensity physical activity each week, or a combination of both.
Th.
