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This article originally appeared promptly.com.
Exercise is among the how to avoid chronic diseases like?diabetes?and?cancer, as well as an early death. But it can be tough to match an agenda: Health experts?recommend?about 150 minutes of moderate activity, or 75 minutes of vigorous, breath-sapping exercise, every week.
Since daily exercise isn’t realistic for everybody, researchers chose to study whether people who have a tendency to cram their weekly exercise into a couple of days around the weekend (so-called “weekend warriors”) obtain the same benefits as people who exercise daily. In the new research published in?JAMA Internal Medicine, they found that how frequently an individual exercises may not really make a difference in determining how long a person lives.
Gary O’Donovan, a research associate in the Exercise as Medicine program at Loughborough University in England, and the colleagues analyzed data from national health surveys of more than 63,000 people, conducted in England and Scotland. Individuals who said they exercised only one or two days a week lowered their chance of dying early from the cause by 30% to 34%, compared to people who were inactive. But that which was more remarkable was that people who exercised most times of a few days lowered their risk by 35%: not so different from people who exercised less.
The findings support the concept that some physical activity-even if it’s under exactly what the guidelines prescribe-helps avoid premature death. Researchers saw benefits for people who squeezed the whole recommended 150 minutes each week into one or two days, and for individuals who didn’t quite meet that threshold and exercised less.
Exercise seemed to be effective at reducing the risk of heart-related death. Those who exercised regularly and people who exercised a few days a week both cut their risk by about 40%. Again, the frequency of exercise didn’t appear to matter.
The same was true for risk of death from cancer. People who exercised-whether it had been every day or only a few days-lowered their chance of dying from cancer by 18% to 21%, than others who didn’t exercise. This risk reduction was true whether they met the recommended physical activity requirements or not.
“The main point our study makes is the fact that frequency of being active is not important,” says O’Donovan. “There doesn’t really appear to be any extra benefit to regular exercise. If that helps people, then I’m happy.”
The results remained significant despite O’Donovan taken into account other variables that could explain the relationship, together with a person’s starting BMI. In fact, the advantages were undeniable for people of all weights, including individuals who were overweight and obese.
That should be heartening to anyone who finds it hard to create here we are at physical activity every single day. Not too you can slack off: O’Donovan stresses that his results focus specifically on moderate-to-vigorous exercise people did in their spare time, plus they don’t apply to housework or physical activity at work, since the surveys didn’t ask about those. The study does, however, include brisk walking, which he says is a good method to start an exercise regimen for individuals wanting to make use of the findings.
“This is new evidence, and perhaps guidelines have to be revisited as new evidence emerges,” says O’Donovan. Meanwhile, it’s clear that exercise-even if it’s only on the weekends-is a worthwhile addition to your routine.
