Exercise is good for your overall health and your heart in particular. Guidelines recommend that we should be doing 150 minutes of moderate-to-vigorous activity a week.
But does it matter when you do this exercise? Should you spread it out in the week or does it lose some of the benefit if you cram it in at the weekend?
A new study analysing data from the UK Biobank has attempted to answer this very question.
Around 90,000 healthy, middle-aged people wore wrist bands (accelerometers) that tracked their activity. It recorded their activity levels for a week with particular attention to moderate-to-vigorous activity (more on that later).
The researchers found that in the six years after the accelerometer assessment, people who did regular moderate-to-vigorous activity had less stroke, heart attack, heart failure and atrial fibrillation (an irregular heart rhythm) compared with sedentary people.
The novel finding of this study was that there was no difference in outcomes in people who did more than half of their activity at the weekend compared with those who spread it out across the week.
It didn’t matter when it was done, moderate-vigorous physical activity was associated with improved heart health.
In the study, the authors called people who did more than of their 150 minutes a week of moderate-to-vigorous activity “weekend warriors”. This gives the impression of Lycra-clad cyclists riding up mountains or muddied middle-aged men playing a gruelling 90 minutes of football.
Over 37,000 people in the study met the definition of the “weekend warrior” so why aren’t the roads filled with cyclists and the parks filled with footballers? It certainly seems to contradict the epidemic of obesity and sedentary lifestyle that we hear so much about.
Read more at: https://www.sciencealert.com