Workouts on weekends benefit heart health nearly as good as weekday excercises: Study

People who pack their recommended exercises into the weekends also have a low risk of heart disease, failure and stroke, similar to the ones who exercise throughout the week, according to a study.

The results obtained by researchers from a major study on “weekend warriors” against the ones who exercise regularly show that the timing of the exercise does not hold as much importance as the amount of activity when it comes to heart health, as per the report published on Tuesday in the journal JAMA.

“Our findings suggest that it is likely the total duration of moderate to vigorous activity, rather than the pattern, that matters most for cardiovascular risk,” says the lead study author, Shaan Khurshid, MD, MPH, an electrophysiologist at Massachusetts General Hospital and an instructor at Harvard Medical School in Boston.

“As a result, more concentrated activity appears to result in similar reductions in risk as more evenly distributed activity,” Dr Khurshid says.

The researchers analysed the data from the UK Biobank, a large biomedical database and research resource. As per the study, more than 100,000 people used accelerometers in order to track their movement over the course of a week.

“We found that both the active regular pattern and the weekend warrior pattern were associated with very similar reductions in risk of heart attack, heart failure, atrial fibrillation and stroke,” said lead study author Dr Shaan Khurshid, staff electrophysiologist at Massachusetts General Hospital and instructor of medicine at Harvard Medical School in Boston.

The researchers while looking at the heart failures, found that the risk was 38% and 36% lower for weekend warriors and more regular exercisers, respectively.

“Physical activity concentrated within one to two days was associated with similarly lower risk of cardiovascular outcomes to more regular activity,” the authors write in the Jama journal.

Now the researchers plan on probing whether exercise patterns and routines show similar results forother diseases. “Our results may also motivate future studies of physical activity interventions delivered in a concentrated fashion, which may be more practical and efficient,” said Ellinor.

(With inputs from agencies)

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