Regular exercise helps to stay healthy and live longer. Above all, the benefit of endurance sports is undisputed. However, there are always discussions about the optimal dose. While it is conventional wisdom among physicians and exercise medicine professionals to run, swim, bike, or row for 50 minutes or more three times a week for best health, there has been recent evidence that shorter exercise sessions are similarly healthy could. This is how the term “weekend warrior” came about, who in his meager free time only spends himself once or twice on the weekend – but all the more intensively.
An international research team has now compared whether the more intensive sport once or twice at the weekend, which adds up to 75 to a maximum of 150 minutes, has just as positive an effect on health as training several times a week, in which the active time is 150 to 300 minutes minutes. In the trade magazine Jama Internal Medicine show the scientists around Mauricio dos Santos from the University of São Paulo that the two training approaches make little difference.
The shorter the training duration, the higher the intensities that should be achieved
More than 350,000 volunteers with an average age of 41 took part in the study. Over the course of ten and a half years, almost 22,000 of them died, almost half of them from cardiovascular diseases or cancer. Compared to the control group, which was physically inactive, both forms of exercise reduced the risk of death by eight to 15 percent. The probability of dying from cancer, heart attack or stroke was similarly reduced in both active groups.
“Anyone who regularly exercises at the intensity we examined benefits from it, regardless of whether the activity is spread over the week or concentrated on a few days at the weekend,” the authors conclude. “The health benefits appear to be very similar.” There is a correlation between duration and intensity. The shorter the training duration, the higher the intensities that should be achieved in order to achieve the same effect on health. So while the jogger who runs three or four times a week can strengthen the heart, circulation and metabolism by trotting slowly, shorter units require a higher level of exertion – up to total exhaustion with the second or minute work that has recently become popular -outs.
More recently, even the one-minute workout and the four-second workout have been touted as producing amazing circulatory and metabolic improvements for short periods of full exertion. However, the short time specifications are misleading, because for the intensive exertion it is necessary to warm up thoroughly beforehand. In addition, the short extreme loads, such as pedaling an exercise bike with full force, should be repeated several times a day in order to have a health benefit.
Sports physicians such as Martin Halle from the Technical University of Munich also emphasize that the differences between two, four or six training sessions per week for recreational athletes often only make up nuances in terms of the positive effect on health. Even more important than encouraging hobby runners to run 45 minutes instead of 30 is to activate those who have not exercised regularly before. “Going from zero to ten or 15 minutes here would do a lot for your health,” says Halle.