Your Heart Loves Exercise—Even If You Only Do It on the Weekends

People who exercise solely on the weekend are likely to get the same cardiovascular benefits as those who spread out their workouts throughout the week, a new study finds.

Finding time to work out each day can sometimes be a challenge, but the new research found that these “weekend warriors” don’t necessarily miss out on certain benefits because they keep their exercise to one or two days a week.

As compared to people who were inactive, weekend warriors and more regular exercisers both saw lower rates of atrial fibrillation, heart attack, heart failure, and stroke. 

The findings come from a study published on July 18 in JAMA that looked at data from nearly 90,000 participants.

“Both have protective effects for cardiovascular disease, showing that it doesn’t really matter if you’re able to exercise every day,” Ronald Maag, MD, assistant professor of cardiology at Baylor College of Medicine and medical director of the Baylor Heart Clinic, told Health.

Maag explained that instead of when you exercise, the important piece to focus on is how many minutes of exercise you‘re doing weekly. It matters less how many workout sessions you’re doing and more so how many total minutes you spend exercising.

Here’s what experts had to say about why weekend warriors and consistent exercisers see similar benefits, and what to know about working out on the weekends.

The benefits or drawbacks to being a weekend warrior have been studied before, but in this study, researchers wanted to get a wider, more concrete pool of evidence, explained Shaan Khurshid, MD, MPH, lead study author and staff electrophysiologist at Massachusetts General Hospital.

Khurshid and his team looked at almost 90,000 participants enrolled in the U.K. Biobank cohort who wore wrist accelerometers to track their movement over the course of one week.

In this analysis, researchers were specifically looking at the relationship between cardiovascular health and moderate-to-vigorous physical activity (MVPA)—this includes exercises such as walking, jogging, stationary cycling, and elliptical. 

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) recommend that all adults get at least 150 minutes of MVPA each week, so researchers used this metric for categorizing people’s activity levels. 

Anyone who didn’t reach that weekly threshold of activity was considered inactive. Weekend warriors were classified as those who met the threshold, but at least 50% of their recommended movement happened in just one or two days, said Khurshid.

Participants were called “active regular” if they got 150 minutes of MVPA weekly, but the activity was more spread out.

After tracking participants for a week, researchers waited another six years to follow up. At that time, they reviewed the last six years of a participant’s life to see how many cardiovascular events had occurred, like heart attack, heart failure, atrial fibrillation, and stroke events.

“The main finding was that both the active weekend warrior and the active regular patterns were associated with significantly lower rates of those events—20% to 40%—and differences between them were very small,” Khurshid told Health.

On average, participants in the study actually exceeded the 150-minute MVPA recommendation and got about 230 minutes of weekly exercise.

Khurshid pointed out that the amount of time spent exercising didn’t change the results, assuming that amount was over the CDC’s 150 minutes per week. People at the 25th percentile exercised for 115 minutes weekly, and those at the 75th percentile had 403 minutes of movement, but the rate of cardiovascular events was similar.

“Regardless of where we drew that line, we saw very similar patterns of decreased risk of cardiovascular events with a weekend warrior versus regular activity,” Khurshid said. “So it didn’t seem to matter.”

The similarity between both groups also persisted when researchers made the definition of a weekend warrior more stringent. Even when people concentrated 75% of their weekly movement in one to two days, Khurshid explained, they still saw similar benefits as their more active peers.

The study is more evidence that if people can make some time to exercise each week—even if it’s not an everyday thing—it can do wonders for heart health.

“Even if you go a few days between sessions where you’re doing a lot of exercise, those benefits aren’t going away,” Khurshid said. “Even up to a week apart [appears] to be enough of a regularity such that you still get the physical benefits from it.”

The research also reinforces just how important exercise is when it comes to keeping the body healthy.

“Exercise is good for weight loss. Exercise is good for lowering blood pressure. Exercise is good for lowering cholesterol, and it’s also good for preventing diabetes or helping control diabetes,” Maag said.

All of these things combined make it less likely that a person is going to have a negative cardiovascular event, such as a heart attack, he explained. 

Though the paper endorses weekend warrior exercise schedules, there are a few things people may want to keep in mind before moving all their workouts to Saturday and Sunday. 

For one, there may be some benefit to implementing a routine—having movement be a part of your everyday routine makes it easier to stick with it, Maag said.

There are also other benefits to exercise such as better sleep and more energy, and many people may feel better after they work out. It’s not clear if the weekend warrior routine provides the same level of benefit in these other areas.

“Exercise affects conditions across the spectrum of disease—things like mental health, respiratory disease, even infectious disease. Do we see similar benefits for weekend warriors versus regular activity across other disease types?” Khurshid asked. “We’re interested in looking at that.”

And whenever a person switches up their exercise routine, Khurshid added, it’s important to start slow.

“We don’t want people to go from zero to 60 when they read this paper, [and] go exercise for three hours if they [haven’t] exercised before in weeks or months,” he said. “We advise people to listen to their body.”

But working your way up to longer periods of physical activity can be a great strategy for people who find it challenging to get 30 minutes of exercise five times a week, as the CDC suggests.

It may also mean that one or two days of exercise could be used as an intervention method for people who are potentially at risk of cardiovascular issues, Khurshid added.

“Sometimes life gets in the way,” Maag said. “People are busy with kids and jobs and things, but they might be able to put that time away on the weekend to get those things done. It’s not a one size fits all type thing.”