Are cramming exercise methods VS regular exercise really equally effective?

If we were to ask what the most painful thing for office workers is, one of them must be - wanting to exercise but having no time to do so.

Anyone who has ever exercised will surely understand the benefits of exercise. After a sweaty workout, not only will every muscle in your body become comfortable, but the endorphins secreted by the brain will also make all the accumulated bad moods disappear, leaving only pure happiness.

Long-term exercise can bring many benefits to our body. Not only does it make us lighter, our brain more flexible, our skin better, but even our immunity is quietly improved.

Exercise feels good for a while, and it will always feel good if you keep exercising.

But when it comes to exercise, the difficult part is not doing it once or twice, but persisting.

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Especially for those working "oxen and horses", they have to meet the deadline today, endless meetings tomorrow, and difficult to serve the client the day after tomorrow... From Monday to Friday, there is no day to exercise happily.

What should I do?

Although it is definitely best to maintain a certain amount of exercise every day, under the pressure of life, who can exercise vigorously after working overtime all day? Therefore, many people choose to exercise in the best mood and state on weekends instead of dragging the pain to exercise, turning into weekend warriors and catching up with the weekly exercise amount.

But can this kind of cramming exercise bring the same benefits as regular exercise?

After all, the mainstream still advocates regular exercise, and rarely mentions this kind of weekend cramming exercise. Is this kind of exercise really effective? Will it bring harm to health?

Not only are we curious about this question, scientists are also curious. A study published in the journal "Circulation" last month helped us answer this question.

Concentrated exercise on weekends is really helpful.

In this study, researchers from Harvard University's Massachusetts General Hospital used a prospective cohort study of the UK Biobank to analyze the relationship between exercise patterns and the incidence of 678 diseases with the cooperation of 89,573 participants.

Based on exercise habits, the researchers divided the subjects into three categories: an inactive group (150 minutes of exercise per week); a regular exercise group (≥150 minutes of exercise per week, evenly distributed throughout the day); and a weekend warrior group (≥150 minutes of exercise per week, but concentrated within 1 to 2 days).

According to the guidelines released by the World Health Organization, adults should engage in at least 150 to 300 minutes of moderate to high-intensity exercise per week - this 150 minutes of exercise is the bottom line for healthy adults' weekly exercise time.

So what effect would spreading those 150 minutes over the course of a week have on the body?

Let me start with an expected result - both the regular exercise group and the weekend warrior group are healthier than the inactive group. Compared with the inactive group, the risk of more than 200 diseases in the two groups was significantly reduced. Among them, the risk of cardiovascular diseases such as hypertension and diabetes was the most significantly reduced.

Participants in the regular exercise group and weekend warrior group had a 23% and 28% lower risk of hypertension, respectively, and a 43% and 45% lower risk of diabetes, respectively, over a median of 6 years. In addition, their risk of obesity was reduced by 45% and 56%, respectively, and their risk of apnea was reduced by 43% and 51%, respectively.

These results show that exercise not only has a significant positive impact on our current physical health, but also has wide-ranging benefits in reducing future disease risks.

But surprisingly, when the regular exercise group was compared with the weekend warrior group, no significant difference was observed between the two - in other words, whether it is daily exercise or weekend cram session, as long as the time is met, the health benefits are similar!

Now, weekend warriors can finally rest assured - as long as you can take time out every week to exercise, whether you exercise every day or concentrate on one or two days, the effect will be equally good!

In fact, there is no such strict standard for exercise. Whether it is the way of exercise or the mode of exercise, it ultimately serves the total amount of exercise - as long as you can find a balance in life and achieve a certain amount of exercise in a comfortable way, you are healthy!

Make up for exercise on weekends by doing this

Friends who have already practiced the "weekend warrior" exercise mode have probably found a set of exercise modes that make them comfortable. If you are still in the "inactive group" and are eager to make up for your exercise by making up for it on weekends, you might as well start finding an exercise method that suits you from now on.

For those who don't like sports, finding time to exercise on a happy weekend is like torture. But in fact, not all sports are boring. Even those who don't like sports can choose relatively more fun sports such as hiking, mountain climbing, cycling, dancing, ball games, etc.

Compared with running, strength training, yoga and other training-oriented exercises, these types of exercise are more interesting, and you only need to do them once to complete a week's worth of exercise. It's like charging once and cruising for a week. They are very suitable for lazy people.

Author: Hydra

Reviewer: Ji Gang, deputy chief physician of orthopedics, the First Hospital of Hebei Medical University

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