Worried that your busy weekday schedule is hurting your health because you can only work out on Saturday and Sunday? Well, weekend warriors, a new study offers some good news for your heart disease risk.
The general recommendation from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services is to get 150 minutes of moderate to intense physical activity or 75 minutes of vigorous activity each week. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention suggests spreading it out throughout the week.
But the new research, published in the JAMA, found that exercising 150 minutes over one or two days can still offer improvements for heart health similar to those that come with working out more days.
Is it better to workout on weekends? What research shows
It’s better to work out just on the weekends that not at all. And new research shows that working out for longer periods just on weekends can offer comparable health benefits to working for shorter periods during the week.
For example, the new JAMA study found that working out 150 minutes over one or two days cut weekend warriors’ heart attack risk by 27% and heart failure risk by 38%, versus 35% and 36% respectively for people who exercised more than two days a week.
Study co-author Dr. Patrick Ellinor, acting chief of cardiology at Massachusetts General Hospital and a professor of medicine at the Harvard Medical School, told NBC News the findings were “a little surprising,” adding that, “getting 150 minutes of moderate to vigorous activity a week is the goal, however you get there.”
The study looked at a group of 90,000 people between 40 and 69 years old who wore devices that measured their physical activity for a week, majority of whom were followed for more than six years afterward. Because of this approach, Ellinor stressed that the study results are limited as there’s no guarantee that the exercise pattern that participants followed the week they were monitored stayed the same for the subsequent years.
But this limitation…
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