Bike trips, hikes, or marathon yard work sessions crammed in over your weekend may be sufficient exercise to lower your risk of disease—even if you don’t work out the rest of the week. According to a recent study, getting the recommended amount of physical activity offers significant health benefits regardless of when you do it.

“One of the major risk factors of chronic disease is a sedentary lifestyle,” Shannon Leggett, a physical therapist and owner of Shannon Leggett Physical Therapy, told The Epoch Times. “Sixty percent of Americans are living with a chronic condition, and over 40 percent have more than one.”

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10/11/2024

“The reason that exercise helps us manage disease risk is because it really improves [the] body’s physiology,” says Milica McDowell, an orthopedic physical therapist and vice president of operations at Gait Happens. “It helps us not go down these paths of sedentary lifestyle, which result in problems like cardiovascular disease and diabetes.”

Is Being a ‘Weekend Warrior’ Safe?

“If you’re working out back-to-back days and you’re not creating rest and recovery, which is really when your body does the adaptation and gets the benefits, it’s just not going to happen,” she told The Epoch Times. “And so there are a lot of disciplines where the weekend warrior approach is just ineffective.”

Performing concentrated activity can also increase your risk of overuse injuries like sprains, stains, and stress fractures. Leggett says performing a dynamic warmup before exercising and stretching or foam rolling after a session can prevent these problems.

She also recommends “a balance of strength training, cardio, and mobility [and] flexibility training as well as some coordination and balance.”

This approach targets different muscles and ranges of motion to help you avoid repeated movements that can lead to injury.

Making Exercise More Accessible

“I think it allows us to say it’s really important that you get your guideline-recommended levels of physical activity ... and it doesn’t matter so much how you do it as long as you do it in a way that works for you and you’re able to be consistent with it,” he says.

Regardless of schedule, McDowell encourages people to find opportunities for activity every day. She says that even just five minutes of movement can benefit bone, gut, and mental health, and it takes only 12 minutes to start seeing cardiovascular benefits.

She also uses a concept called baselining to help people increase their activity levels over time. “Baseline” is the longest period you can perform an activity before feeling fatigued, sore, or in need of extra rest.

“Once you have your baseline, then you have a better sense of what your capacity is,” she says. “And when we’re building programs for people to improve, we generally ... don’t increase more than 10 to maybe 20 percent per week.”

For example, if you can walk for 30 minutes at a time this week before getting tired, try increasing your sessions to 35 minutes next week.

To start adding more movement to your lifestyle, Leggett and McDowell recommend taking practical steps to make exercise as accessible and consistent as possible, such as scheduling a set time on your calendar for workouts, pairing up with an accountability buddy or workout partner, or leaving workout equipment by the TV so you can perform a few sets while watching your favorite show.

Khurshid also says it’s important to remember that everyday movements like climbing stairs or doing chores can count toward reaching recommended activity levels. In the study, even “weekend warrior” participants got some of their activity during the week just by living their lives.

“When you wear an activity tracker, that’s tracking everything,” he says. “So it’s actually very difficult or impossible to get all of your [activity in one day] and none of it on other days.”