It found that weekend warriors, or people who jammed almost all of their exercise into a day or two, usually on the weekends, were much less likely to develop heart problems than people who rarely exercised at all.
This weekend-warrior approach to exercise seems, on the face of it, ill-advised, unlikely to contribute as much to good health as more-consistent workouts do. It didn’t matter if the exercisers worked out many times during the week or only once or twice, which is the scientific definition of a weekend warrior. If they met the exercise-guideline threshold, they could work out on many days or few. Their life spans couldn’t tell the difference.But that study and most other past research about weekend warriors relied on people’s memories of how often and when they exercised, which can be notoriously unreliable.
They began by gathering data from the UK Biobank, which houses copious health information about hundreds of thousands of British adults, many of whom wore activity trackers for a week to objectively measure their movements. Most important, the exercisers showed much less risk for any of the heart conditions than the men and women who didn’t meet the exercise guidelines, and their risks were almost identical, whether they were weekend warriors or not.