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It’s a fact that exercise is essential for a healthy, long life. It’s key to both physical and mental health, and as a part of your 100 Year Lifestyle®. However, with busy work schedules and sedentary jobs, it can be difficult to keep up with your ideal exercise schedule. If you’ve been worrying about being one of the weekend warriors, take heart. Recent studies have found that being a Weekend Warrior can offer significant health benefits for both the body and the brain.
The Body
The first study analyzed nearly 90,000 participants and aimed to assess whether the Weekend Warrior physical activity pattern, where most moderate to vigorous physical activity is concentrated in 1-2 days, provides similar cardiovascular benefits compared to those who spread their activity evenly throughout the week.
Participants were classified into three groups:
Active Weekend Warriors participating in 150 minutes or less of moderate to vigorous physical exercise occurring over 1-2 days.
Active exercisers exercises participating in 150 minutes or less of moderate to vigorous physical exercise spread over the week.
Inactive exercises participating in less than 150 minutes of moderate to vigorous physical exercise per week.
The study evaluated the risk of cardiovascular events, including atrial fibrillation, heart attack, and heart failure. They found that both Weekend Warriors and active regular exercises were associated with significantly lower risks of cardiovascular events compared to the inactive group. Specifically:
Atrial fibrillation – 22% lower risk for Weekend Warriors and 19% lower for active exercisers.
Heart Attack – 27% lower risk for Weekend Warriors and 35% lower for active exercisers.
Heart failure – 38% lower risk for Weekend Warriors and 36% lower for active exercisers.
Stroke – 21% lower risk for Weekend Warriors and 17% lower for active exercisers.
Everyone Wins
Surprisingly, Weekend Warriors experienced similar and, in some cases, higher reductions in cardiovascular risks as exercisers who spread their workouts over the week. Both approaches provide comparable health benefits in reducing the risk of heart disease, atrial fibrillation, and stroke. So, if you have been using the excuse of not having time during the week to exercise as a reason to skip exercising altogether, that no longer works.
Even though they didn’t exercise as regularly, Weekend Warriors saw impressive health benefits. In addition to the main findings, they experienced significant reductions in the risks for dementia, stroke, Parkinson’s disease, depression, and anxiety. In fact, Weekend Warriors even outperformed regular exercisers in some areas, suggesting that concentrated exercise sessions might be more effective than originally thought.
The Brain
The same study built on that research to find that Weekend Warriors receive similar brain health benefits of regular exercisers. Regarding brain health, the researchers looked at two distinct groupings. The first, a neurological grouping, included Parkinson’s disease, stroke, and dementia. The second grouping was psychological and included depression, anxiety, and bipolar disorder.
Over the course of an eight year follow-up period the Weekend Warriors had comparable risk reduction to the regularly active group across the entire spectrum of brain health with one exception. The exception was bipolar disorder, where the condition was not at all impacted by any physical activity patterns.
The final risk reduction levels for Weekend Warriors for specific conditions were:
Dementia: 23%
Stroke: 13%
Parkinson’s disease: 49%
Depression: 26%
Anxiety: 28%
Conclusions
Make no mistake, getting as much exercise as you can on a regular basis, whether that’s over two days per week or 7, is important. We all benefit from moving as much as possible.
However, if you have been sitting on the couch all weekend because you missed working out all week, now you know better. Significant mental and physical health benefits are available to Weekend Warriors.
On thing. Be aware that you do need to be careful not to injure yourself by concentrating all your physical activity into a short period of time. The way you do that is to build your endurance over time, listen to your body, and keep your body working at peak levels by seeing your 100 Year Lifestyle® chiropractor on a regular basis.
Whether you are a Weekend Warrior or a professional athlete, your 100 Year Lifestyle provider® knows how to keep you in the game, functioning at 100%, for 100 years or more. Schedule an appointment today!
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