‘Weekend warrior,’ regular physical activity patterns show similar health benefits
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Key takeaways:
- Weekend warrior and regular physical activity patterns were associated with lower risk for more than 200 incident diseases.
- Both activity patterns had prominent effects on cardiometabolic conditions.
Adults who followed a “weekend warrior” physical activity pattern had a similarly lower risk for incident disease compared with those who followed a regular activity pattern, according to study findings published in Circulation.
Although guidelines recommend for at least 150 minutes of moderate to vigorous physical activity a week, it had been unknown how it was best to accrue that duration of activity.
“Despite previous insights, the broader effects of weekend warrior activity on incident disease, as well as potentially important consequences on cardiometabolic health, remain poorly understood,” Shinwan Kany, MD, MSc, a cardiology fellow at the University Heart and Vascular Center Hamburg-Eppendorf in Hamburg, Germany, and a visiting scientist at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard and the Cardiovascular Research Center of Massachusetts General Hospital, and colleagues wrote. “Given the robust relationship between cardiometabolic factors and future cardiovascular disease, better characterization of how varying physical activity patterns may affect cardiometabolic and overall health is needed to inform future efforts aiming to leverage physical activity to improve public health.”
To assess associations between physical activity patterns and incidence of 678 conditions, Kany and colleagues conducted a phenome-wide association study with data from 89,573 participants (mean age, 62 years; 56% women) from the UK Biobank prospective cohort study who wore a wrist-based accelerometer for 1 week from June 2013 to 2015.
The researchers used a published machine learning-based method to classify moderate to vigorous physical activity, considering activities such as walking, jogging, stationary cycling and elliptical.
Based on the guidance for 150 minutes or more of moderate to vigorous physical activity per week, the researchers categorized participants into three activity pattern groups: inactive (< 150 minutes per week), weekend warrior ( 150 minutes per week, with 50% of total moderate to vigorous physical activity over 1 to 2 days) and regular ( 150 minutes per week, with 50% of total moderate to vigorous physical activity over more than 2 days).
Overall, 33.7% of participants were categorized as inactive (n = 30,228; 96.6% white; 66.8% women), 42.2% were categorized as weekend warriors (n = 37,872; 97.5% white; 51% women) and 24% were categorized as regular (n = 21,473; 96.6% white; 51.1% women).
Using multivariable Cox proportional hazards models, the researchers found 267 significant associations between weekend warrior activity and risk for incident disease, 264 of which showed lower risks with HRs ranging from 0.35 to 0.89. Most of these represented circulatory (16.5%), metabolic (14.2%) and digestive (12%) conditions.
Specifically, the researchers observed the strongest associations for cardiometabolic conditions including incident hypertension (HR = 0.77; 95% CI, 0.73-0.8), diabetes (HR = 0.57; 95% CI, 0.51-0.62), obesity (HR = 0.55; 95% CI, 0.5-0.6) and sleep apnea (HR = 0.57; 95% CI, 0.48-0.69).
Similarly, they found 209 significant associations between regular activity and risk for incident disease, 205 of which were risk reductions, with HRs ranging from 0.41 to 0.88. Again, most of these represented circulatory (14.4%), metabolic (13.9%) and digestive (13.4%) conditions.
“On balance, our findings suggest that physical activity possesses potential for positive public health impact spanning a wide spectrum of disease,” the researchers wrote.
Among the regular activity group, the strongest associations were also observed for incident hypertension (HR = 0.72; 95% CI, 0.68-0.77), diabetes (HR = 0.54; 95% CI, 0.48-0.6), obesity (HR = 0.44; 95% CI, 0.4-0.5) and sleep apnea (HR = 0.49; 95% CI, 0.39-0.62).
Additionally, they noted that there were no conditions for which the effect of physical activity on disease differed significantly when directly comparing the weekend warrior and regular activity patterns.
“Especially because the weekend warrior pattern appears common, and may be more feasible for certain contemporary lifestyles, our findings compel future work to assess the effectiveness of concentrated physical activity interventions for reducing the risk of future disease,” the researchers wrote.
Kany and colleagues acknowledged several study limitations, including that the study cannot be used to infer causal relationships due to its observational design.
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