Too slammed to exercise during the work week? All is not lost.
We all know it’s healthy to include some movement in our daily routines, but finding the motivation (and time) amid a busy workweek can be a major challenge.
Luckily, a recent study of more than 89,000 participants in the UK Biobank program found that people who managed to get 150 minutes of exercise in during the weekend still received health benefits compared to those who were inactive — for instance, “weekend warriors” had a 20 percent lower risk of hypertension and 40 percent lower risk of diabetes than those who did fewer than 150 minutes of exercise per week. When researchers compared the results of participants who did all their exercise on the weekend versus those who spread it out over the course of the week, they found no significant difference in disease risk.
This echoes the results of a 2023 Harvard study, which found that people who squeeze their entire 2.5 hours of weekly exercise into the weekend cut their heart attack risk almost as much as those who spread it throughout the week — and cut their risk of heart failure by 38 percent, as opposed to 36 percent for those who report working out “little and often.”
“The idea that you could cram it all into a weekend or two days a week was a little surprising,” study co-author Patrick Ellinor, MD, PhD, director of cardiac arrhythmia service at Massachusetts General Hospital and a professor of medicine at the Harvard Medical School, told NBC News last year. But maybe it shouldn’t have been such a shock — a 2022 study that looked at the physical activity of over 350,000 adults found that adults who exercised for 150 minutes or more per week experienced lower mortality, including from heart disease and cancer, regardless of how they spread the activity out during the week.
How long should you exercise for heart health?
Dr. Ellinor stressed that the key goal is “getting 150 minutes of moderate to vigorous activity a week is the goal, however you get there.”
The Harvard researchers discovered that people who crammed their 2.5 hours of activity into one or two days slashed their probability of suffering a heart attack by 27 percent, versus 35 percent among those who exercised more regularly for shorter periods of time. Remember, your body can’t tell whether it’s Wednesday or Sunday, so if you’re jamming your entire weekly exercise into, say, Monday and Tuesday, you’ll reap the same benefits as if you were doing so on the weekend.
A note of caution
While your heart may thank you for your long exercise session, you should take care that ramping up your activity doesn’t cause the rest of your body too much stress. Going suddenly from being sedentary all week to vigorous movement can cause injuries like sprains or pulled muscles, so low-impact movement, like swimming or cycling, might be better options to start with than, say, running. Be sure to warm up and cool down, pay attention to how your body’s feeling, and if something starts to hurt, get it checked out.
