Many individuals cram their physical exercises into 1 or 2 days in a weekend or just skip the exercise due to busy schedules and other day to day activities. However, researchers at Massachusetts General Hospital have discovered that this “weekend warrior” sedentary behaviour is connected to having a decreased danger of developing 264 other diseases in the future and is equally effective in minimizing risk as consistent exercise.
In this study, researchers describe the potential benefits for an activity pattern that infrequently occurs during weekends to prevent not only cardiovascular diseases, as previously demonstrated by researchers, but also to predict future diseases, including all aspects of the spectrum: ranging from renal diseases to mood disorders, and even more.
Besides people satisfying those criteria are benefits that are offered to those exercisers, who exercise for 20-30 min most of the days of the week larger than for those individuals who can exercise during 5-6 days without significant interruptions?
Study co-senior author Patrick Ellinor, MD, Ph.D., acting chief of Cardiology, and the co-director of the Corrigan Minehan Heart Center at Massachusetts General Hospital, and other researchers used data from 89,573 participants in the prospective UK Biobank study that wore wrist accelerometers to record the total physical activity and time spent in various exercise intensity for one week.
They examined the relationships between the different patterns of physical activity and the intensity, prevalence, and incidence of 678 conditions categorized into 16 disease types, such as diseases affecting mental health, digestive system, neural system, and so on.
Weekend warrior and regular physical activity patterns noted senior authors, was each correlated with 203 less risks for diseases than a sedentary lifestyle. This, said Khurshid, explained why our results were quite robust to a wide variety of definitions of weekend warrior activity as well as other thresholds used to classify people as active.
‘Because it seems there are similar advantages to weekend warrior versus consistency, it may then be the overall quantity of exercise that is most important, not the schedule,’ Khurshid explained. “Further research is needed to examine the effectiveness of focused efforts to enhance physical activity in the population, but patients should be advised to pursue physical activities which are in accordance with recommendations, according to any pattern that is effective”.
Reference:
Massachusetts General Hospital. “Weekend warrior” physical activity may help protect against more than 200 diseases. MedicalXpress
