How weekend workouts may be as effective as exercising all week

Can I just workout on the weekend? New research finds exercising only one or two days a week can be beneficial for the heart.

If you don’t have time to exercise during the week, longer workouts over the weekend may be as good for the heart.

Adults should get 150 minutes of moderate to vigorous activity per week, most guidelines recommend, with the typical advice to spread it out through the week. Harvard researchers were surprised to find that people who jammed their 2.5 hours of activity into one or two days cut their risk of heart attack by 27%, compared to 35% among people who exercised more days of the week. "Weekend warriors" also saw heart failure risk drop by 38%, compared to 36% among regular exercisers, the new study published Tuesday in JAMA found.

“The idea that you could cram it all into a weekend or two days a week was a little surprising,” study co-author Dr. Patrick Ellinor, acting chief of cardiology at Massachusetts General Hospital and a professor of medicine at the Harvard Medical School, said.

The bottom line, Ellinor said, is that “getting 150 minutes of moderate to vigorous activity a week is the goal, however you get there.”

To take a closer look at how the timing of exercise made a difference, researchers turned to the UK Biobank, a widely used database of 502,629 participants, ages 40 to 69, who were enrolled between 2006 and 2010. For the new research, a subset of the group agreed to wear wrist-mounted accelerometers, which measure physical activity 24 hours a day.

https://www.nbcnews.com/health/heart-health/weekend-workouts-heart-health-two-day-week-rcna94707

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