Cramming your exercise into the weekend not only brings physical benefits on par with regular workouts, but is just as good for your brain, a study suggests.
Research has previously revealed that physical exercise is associated with better brain health and lower risk of dementia in old age.
Now a study of more than 10,000 people has found that both “weekend warriors” – people who exercised just once or twice a week – and those who undertook more regular physical activity showed reductions in the risk of mild dementia in compared to inactive individuals.
“I think our study is more good news for busy people around the world,” said Dr Gary O’Donovan. “This is our latest weekend warrior study, and it’s now becoming increasingly clear that the benefits of exercising once or twice a week are much the same as exercising more often.”
The “weekend warrior” pattern of physical activity has become a popular topic of research. Among other things, a study led by Dr Shaan Khurshid of Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston found that those who fit a week’s worth of exercise into one or two days had a lower risk of developing more than 200 diseases compared to inactive people, with regular exercisers having experience similar benefits.
Research suggests that intermittent exercise can also have benefits for the brain.
“This is the first longitudinal study to show that the physical activity pattern of the weekend warrior is also good for mental health,” said O’Donovan.
Writing in the British Journal of Sports MedicineO’Donovan and colleagues report how they analyzed data from the Mexico City Prospective Study, a research effort in which individuals aged 35 and older were interviewed for the first time between 1998 and 2004 and for a second time between 2015 and 2019.
The results of the first survey revealed that 79.2% out of 10,033 participants reported that they did no sport or exercise, 7.2% were “weekend warriors” who reported that they did once or twice a week exercised, and 13.6% exercised more often.
In the second survey, participants were screened for cognitive impairment and dementia. The results show that 26% of those who reported no sport or exercise at the first survey met criteria for mild dementia when the traditional threshold was used, compared with 14% of weekend warriors and 18.5% of regularly active group.
A further analysis, taking into account factors such as age, gender, education, income, smoking and body mass index, found the weekend warrior group had a 25% lower risk of mild dementia compared to the inactive group, while the regularly active group had an 11% lower risk.
The team estimated that 13% of mild dementia cases would be eliminated if all middle-aged adults participated in sports or exercise at least once or twice a week.
While O’Donovan said it was not clear why the weekend warrior group had a lower risk of mild dementia than those who undertook more regular exercise, he said it may depend on the nature of the screening tool, emphasizing that it did not ‘ a clinical diagnosis is not. . The team noted that the two active groups showed similar decreases in risk compared to the inactive group when a different threshold for the screening tool was used.
Khurshid, who was not involved in the study, welcomed the research, noting that while it relied on self-reported exercise that could be subject to error, it supports the idea that individuals should get their physical activity in a way that works for them. work.
“This adds to the growing body of evidence that concentrated physical activity is associated with beneficial health outcomes, and in this case cognitive impairment adds to the list,” he said.
Indeed, Khurshid said previous work has emphasized it’s the total volume of exercise, rather than the pattern, that matters most for disease risk.
“So if you’re going to be a weekend warrior, you need to train longer on those fewer sessions per week so you’re still getting the recommended activity volumes,” he said.
