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It doesn’t take much to derail a weekday workout: an unexpected meeting, family obligations, a last-minute dinner with friends. Before you know it, there’s no time to squeeze in a spin class.
Sound familiar? Don’t sweat it, says Wes Troyer, D.O., a physical medicine and rehabilitation specialist at the Mayo Clinic, as long as you’re making time for exercise on the weekends. Accumulating research suggests that people who pack in the recommended weekly 150 minutes of physical activity over one to two days can reap the same health benefits as those who spread it out over the week.
“There’s hope for people who are weekend warriors, or people that are putting in most of their time on the weekends,” Troyer says — and the data suggests that’s a lot of us.
A 2023 JAMA study of nearly 90,000 individuals found that roughly 42 percent of participants saved their workouts for the weekend, or at least condensed them to one or two days. And doing so still resulted in heart-health benefits.
Compared with inactive adults, the so-called weekend warriors had lower risks for heart disease and stroke, and these lower risks were similar to the benefits seen among individuals who distributed their exercise more evenly throughout the week. The weekend exercisers also had similarly lower risks of heart failure and atrial fibrillation, an irregular heart rhythm that can increase the risk of a cardiovascular event.
“Our findings suggest that interventions to increase physical activity, even when concentrated within a day or two each week, may [improve] cardiovascular outcomes,” senior author Patrick T. Ellinor, M.D., acting chief of the Cardiology Division at Massachusetts General Hospital, said in a news release.
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