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Different exercise patterns bring health benefits

The study suggests that physical activity can bring health benefits no matter how it is spread out during the week.Maridav / Shutterstock

Regular physical activity can help prevent many health conditions, including heart disease and diabetes. National guidelines recommend that people get a minimum of 150 minutes of moderate to vigorous physical activity each week. But due to pressures from work, school, or other stressors, it can be hard to exercise regularly.

Many people do recreational activities like hiking, team sports, or bicycling on their days off. This can be enough to meet the guideline-recommended levels of exercise. Studies have suggested that this “weekend warrior” pattern of exercise may be as beneficial for people as spreading activity out over a week.

To look at different patterns of physical activity in a large population, researchers led by Dr. Shaan Khurshid from Massachusetts General Hospital used data from the UK Biobank for a new study, funded in part by NIH. The UK Biobank has been following the health of more than half a million adults for almost two decades. Participants joined the study between the ages of 40 to 69. Almost 90,000 of the participants wore a wrist accelerometer for a week when they entered the study.

The researchers used this activity data to break the participants into three groups. The first group got less than 150 minutes of exercise per week. These were considered inactive. The second included people who exercised regularly, for at least 150 minutes spread out over the week. The third group, called weekend warriors, also passed the 150-minute threshold, but did most of it in just one or two days.

The team then compared the risk of developing 678 health conditions over an average follow-up period of six years. The analyses accounted for other factors that could affect disease risk. These included age, sex, ethnicity, tobacco and alcohol use, and diet. Results were published on September 26, 2024 in Circulation.

The researchers found that people in both exercise groups had a reduced risk of developing more than 250 different health conditions compared to people who were inactive. The largest reductions in risk were for diseases that affect the cardiovascular system and metabolism, such as high blood pressure, diabetes, obesity, and sleep apnea. For example, both the regular exercise and weekend warrior groups had more than a 40% lower risk of developing diabetes during the study than people who were inactive.

The researchers found no differences between the regular exercise and weekend warrior groups in the reduction of risk for any disease. This remained true for people in the two groups who got substantially more than the recommended minimum activity a week.

“Because there appears to be similar benefits for weekend warrior versus regular activity, it may be the total volume of activity, rather than the pattern, that matters most,” Khurshid says. “Future interventions testing the effectiveness of concentrated activity to improve public health are warranted, and patients should be encouraged to engage in guideline-adherent physical activity using any pattern that may work best for them.”

More research will be needed to better understand the effects of different activity patterns. These could involve tracking activity patterns over longer periods of time and having more extended follow-up.

—by Sharon Reynolds