José Giner is 63 years old. For the last five years he has been cycling with a group of friends to pedal along the roads and orchard paths of the Horta Sud region of Valencia. They do it on Saturday or Sunday. They cycle for three or four hours, depending on the route chosen. It is all your weekly physical activity – if by the concept of “physical activity” we understand the practice of a sport. “I have a very bad shift schedule. In the mornings or afternoons that I have free, I usually do pending work at home or in the field,” he explains. Like José, according to data from the Survey of Sports Habits in Spain 2022, from the former Ministry of Culture and Sports, 16% of people who practice sports acknowledge that they do so mainly during the weekend and holidays.
Until now, condensing weekly exercise recommendations (a minimum of 150 minutes of moderate exercise, according to the World Health Organization and the main clinical guidelines) into one or two days was to some extent frowned upon, because that revealed a majority of sedentary days. The most common suggestions were for four or five days of training. However, a study recently published in the scientific journal Circulation —using data from almost 90,000 people enrolled in the UK Biobank project—has concluded that what is known as ‘weekend warrior’ physical activity has the same health benefits as regular physical activity compared to inactive life .
According to the research data, people who met weekly exercise recommendations in one or two days had a lower risk of developing more than 200 diseases compared to inactive people. The strongest associations were observed in the decreased risk of developing cardiometabolic diseases such as hypertension, diabetes or obesity.
“In this study we show the possible benefits of weekend physical activity for the risk not only of cardiovascular disease, as we have shown in the past, but also of future diseases that span the spectrum, from conditions such as chronic kidney disease to mood disorders and more,” says Shaan Khurshid, study co-author and physician assistant at the Telemachus and Irene Demoulas Family Foundation Cardiac Arrhythmia Center at Massachusetts General Hospital.
For Luis Rodríguez Padial, president of the Spanish Society of Cardiology, the data from the study are “reassuring” for people who, like himself, do physical exercise mainly during the weekend. “There are studies that have shown that three days of exercise could reduce the risk of disease, but it was not so clear whether concentrating all the activity in one or two days would be equally useful or not. The research, with a large number of patients, shows that the results are similar to those obtained by those who spread their time during the week,” he says.
An opinion shared by Almudena Beltrán, a specialist in internal medicine and member of the Checkup Unit at the Clínica Universidad de Navarra (CUN), who also considers it relevant that the average age of the research participants was around 62 years, just the age group in which the incidence of mortality from cardiovascular disease and the appearance of metabolic risk factors begins to increase, “which, as the study points out, is where physical exercise has the most impact and effect.”
Regarding the results of the study, Beltrán highlights that they provide medical personnel with a “new tool” to help patients prevent diseases through physical exercise. Especially those who point to lack of time as a reason for not exercising or who give up doing it on a Saturday or Sunday “because it’s just for one day.”
“This is a very good tool to be able to individualize and adapt to the patient. That is, not limit ourselves to giving standard guidelines to everyone, but rather ask ourselves what the life of each one of them is like in order to help them make reaching the recommended thresholds of physical exercise something possible,” argues the specialist.
In exercise, is quality more important than regularity?
Researcher Shaan Khurshid concluded in a press release distributed by Massachusetts General Hospital that since there appear to be similar benefits for weekend physical activity, it is possible that in the pillar of health that constitutes physical exercise the most important “It is the total volume of activity, above the pattern” followed to perform that exercise. In that sense, Khurshid pointed out that patients should be encouraged to comply with the recommended guidelines “using whatever pattern may work best for them.”
Although it is an observational study, the results of which must be reaffirmed in future research, both Luis Rodríguez Padial and Almudena Beltrán agree that what Khurshid stated is one of the great conclusions left by the study. “To put it simply, the results of the study say that you do whatever you can for those 150 minutes. The important thing is to achieve the quantity. And this is another novelty, because the normal thing has been to recommend distributing the activity throughout the week: three days of aerobic and two of strength,” says Beltrán.
“It is worth seeing if these results are replicated in other studies, but in my opinion I think they are consistent data,” adds Rodríguez Pardial, who nevertheless remembers that 150 minutes of physical exercise is the minimum threshold from which results are obtained. great health benefits. “150 minutes is the minimum. The more the better. But the important thing, as this study shows, is to escape from a sedentary life,” he concludes.