You only have to exercise one (or two) days a week for optimum health

Here’s some good news for those of you who know you should exercise but get discouraged by the notion of sweating it out at the gym four or five days a week—you don’t have to.

In fact, being a weekend warrior—being physically active for just one or two days a week—could be all it takes to boost health and longevity.

But the exercise you do needs to be pretty strenuous, and you need to do it for 150 minutes, or two-and-a-half hours—whether that’s achieved in one or two days. 

It’s good news for those who lead busy lives and can’t find the time to exercise most days, say researchers from the School of Public Health at Southern Medical University in Guangzhou, China. 

As long as you’re doing 150 minutes of ‘moderate to vigorous’ activity during your week, you get all the health benefits, even if you did it in just one day, the researchers found after they assessed the exercise levels and health of more than 93,000 people who had been tracked by a UK biomedical study.  

The participants were grouped into three activity levels: the weekend warriors who exercised just one or two days a week; the regularly active, who exercised most days, and the inactive, who fell short of the recommended 150 minutes of weekly activity.

The researchers found that the weekend warriors were 32 percent less likely to die from any cause compared to the inactive, while death from heart disease was 31 percent lower and from cancer by 21 percent.  

To their surprise, the researchers found that the weekend warriors enjoyed the greatest protective effects.  By comparison, the regularly active were 26 percent less likely to die from any cause compared to the inactive, and their risk of dying from heart disease and cancer was 24 and 13 percent lower.

The only worry is that the weekend warrior may overdo things and put greater stress on the body and suffer more musculoskeletal injuries as a result.  So, if you are going to restrict your activity to just one or two days, do warm-ups before you start, and perhaps build up intensity and duration over a few weeks.

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