When you feel like you’ve barely got enough time in the day as it is, getting at least two and a half hours of moderate-to-vigorous physical activity per week can feel almost impossible. That number comes from the CDC’s recommendations for all adults, which suggests breaking up the 150 minutes into 30 minutes a day, five days a week, in addition to two days of strength training for all major muscle groups.
Working out five days a week might not be realistic for parents juggling full-time jobs and kids’ busy schedules, or people working shifts demanding 12 hours at a time. Many barely have the energy to cook dinner at the end of a long day.
Those people might be inclined to become “weekend warriors”—people who save their workouts for the weekend. And there’s good news for those weekend warriors: A new study published in Circulation journal indicates one to two days of exercise might be just as beneficial as exercising throughout the week, if you are still hitting those overall physical activity guidelines.
A case for ‘weekend warriors’
“It’s hard to get somebody to engage multiple times per week, if it’s a large time commitment or a spread out time commitment,” says Dr. Shaan Khurshid, lead author of the study and a faculty member in the Demoulas Center for Cardiac Arrhythmias at Massachusetts General Hospital.
Khurshid tells Fortune that he observed as busy lifestyles are becoming more common, more people are concentrating their exercise into one or two days. That set him and his team out to answer the question: Do those who exercise 20–30 minutes most days reap more health benefits than those who opt for longer exercise sessions on one or two days of the week?
Not necessarily, it seems.
Weekend warriors and regular exercisers had an almost equally lowered risk of developing 264 diseases, especially hypertension, diabetes, obesity, and sleep apnea.
Khurshid and his colleagues examined data on 89,573 individuals wearing physical activity trackers on their wrists for a full week. 30,228 participants were classified as the inactive group (exercising less than 150 minutes per week), 37,872 were in the weekend warrior group (exercising for at least 150 minutes, one to two days per week), and 21,473 were in the regular group (exercising for at least 150 minutes dispersed throughout the week).
All participants were engaging in moderate-to-vigorous exercise—what Khurshid defines as activity that gets your heart rate up to the point where speaking is hard, and singing is almost impossible. That includes activities like jogging or playing a sport, he says.
Both weekend warrior and regular activity patterns had similarly reduced health risks compared to the inactive group for all disease categories tested, including: heart attack (27% and 35% reduced risk respectively), stroke (21% and 17% lower risk), and diabetes (43% and 46% lower risks, respectively).
“We didn’t see any diseases where one [workout] pattern was better than the other,” Khurshid tells Fortune.
150 minutes of exercise is still the magic number
If you’re working out just two days out of the week, you’ll probably have to concentrate a good amount of exercise into that short period. Weekend warrior and regular activity patterns had similar benefits because the participants exercised for a similar total volume during the week.
The regular during-the-week exercisers had a median volume of 418 minutes of moderate-to-vigorous physical activity, while the weekend warriors had a median volume of 288 minutes. What’s most important here is they all were well above the 150 minutes per week guideline from the CDC.
Khurshid says the bottom line is “however works for you best to get those guideline recommended levels.”
He acknowledged that a limitation of the study was that they only tracked participants for one week; however, Khurshid says, one week of tracking still seems to be indicative of people’s regular activity habits.
Empowered exercisers
Khurshid says people who are struggling to work out more than a day or two per week can see this study as validating their chosen routines and busy schedules.
“It’s empowering to be able to say, ‘Get the volume that you need to get, but it doesn’t matter how you do it. It’s important that you do it,’” Khurshid says.
“We don’t need to unnecessarily put constraints on how somebody should get their activity or make it harder for somebody to get their activity by saying, ‘You’ve got to do five days a week, you’ve got to do 30 minutes at a time,’” Khusrhid says. “It empowers you to find a routine that works for you and stick with it.”
Khurshid is hoping that these findings will catapult him into more research on the topic, such as how many weeks in a year you need to hit that 150-minute threshold to see health benefits. Ideally, participants will wear activity trackers for years, he says, to have more long-term data to analyze.
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