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Any Day of the Week is a Good Day for Exercising

Every other day during the week you plan to get up early and go for a jog-but this has never happened even once-either you never planned to include exercise in your daily routine or you were busy day and night at office. Not once during weekdays could you do cardio or strength training exercises. You try to compensate for this loss over the weekend and feel good after some hard-hitting workout at the gym or a game of cricket with your friends. After all this, the question still lingers in your mind-does being a weekend warrior affect your health positively or are you trying to satisfy yourself mentally?
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The downside of this strategy is that the person mostly overdoes the job spraining his/her muscle, experiencing back pain or other pains due to overuse injuries. All this is the result of trying to do too much in too little time. This is one main reason for experts to suggest exercising most days of the week instead of exercising only during the weekends.

The Latest Study
If exercising or doing physical activity during the weekdays scares you literally, don’t worry. Working out only during the weekends has health benefits too, according to a new study. The so-called weekend warriors try to fit in a week’s worth of exercise into just a day or two. The study published in the journal JAMA conveys that these weekend warriors who fulfilled recommended physical activity guidelines (at least 150 min of moderate physical activity or 75 minutes of intense physical activity every week) were at a reduced risk of death from cardiovascular disease, cancer and other causes. The study was a long-term one that covered the following aspects:

• More than 63,000 adults in England and Scotland were called for a survey about their health and physical activity between 1994 and 2012.
• Almost 2/3rd of study subjects were considered inactive-11% were regularly active and 4% were weekend warriors. Others were ‘insufficiently active’ in the sense that they were not sedentary but did not meet the recommended activity levels too.
• Information on the death of the participants from different causes such as cardiovascular disease and cancer were collected during this period.
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Regular exercisers had decreased death rates compared to weekend warriors, but the differences were almost meagre. Weekend warriors too enjoyed their share of advantages-they had a 30% lower risk of death from any cause, 40% lower risk of death due to cardiovascular disease and 18% lower risk of death due to cancer.

Perception Change
This study is an eye-opener on our perception about weekend warriors who are mostly advised to change their routine as they might injure themselves otherwise. Generally, there is also a strong belief that we cannot reap any benefit by only exercising twice a weekend instead of doing it on at least most days of the week.

However, one needs to remember that, the weekend warriors who participated in the study met or exceeded current activity guidelines, they exercised for more than a day or two, and also exercised intensely. Also, injuries are common among weekend warriors, but this study did not collect information on that aspect.

One thing is certain-being active is the need of the hour as inactivity is predominantly present. How many times you exercise, what type of exercise you do and what is the duration-all these are secondary. It is better to be late than never, similarly it is better to be active than sedentary! Get into the groove of exercising first, then you will slowly tune yourself to exercise daily irrespective of the date or day of the week. Along with this, it is better to follow a healthy diet plan suggested by reputed dietitians or nutritionists at www.firsteatright.com to achieve excellent health benefits.