Name: Weekend Warriors.
Years: 41.
Who is 41? The average weekend warrior. Well, 41 is the average age of a group of adults in the United States who were part of a roughly 10-year study led by Jiangnan University in China.
Big group, right? 350,978 adults. So yeah, I think we can treat this study with some respect.
Respect duly granted. So what is it about? Are we talking about those people who wear like Roman soldiers or Arthurian knights and have mock battles on weekends? Er, no, another kind of weekend warrior. Nor are they terracotta. We are talking about exercise here.
Continue. So the people in the study are all the people who get 150 minutes a week of moderate activity or 75 minutes of vigorous exercise…
Looks a lot like. Not really, it’s what public health officials recommend.
Does Call of Duty count as moderate or vigorous exercise? Neither. Vigorous means running, swimming, playing soccer, things that make you breathe fast and it’s hard to talk while doing it. Moderate means you are still breathing faster but can talk, and includes brisk walking and mowing the lawn. Anyway, they were divided into two groups…
With 175,489 in each? Well done, you can count! One group was people who are “regularly active,” meaning they reach those goals in three or four sessions a week. And the other group was the people who do it all in one or two sessions a week.
The so-called “weekend warriors”? Exactly. Like the person who plays a soccer game on a Sunday and nothing else. I guess a vigorous re-enactment of the battle would do too, especially if you’re wearing chainmail.
And what did they find? They compared the death rates over the 10 years for the two groups — those who exercised regularly and the weekend warriors who did the same amount of exercise but focused on one or two sessions — and found the rates to be similar.
Summarize please? The study, published in the journal JAMA Internal Medicineconcluded: “People who engage in recommended levels of physical activity may experience the same benefit if sessions are held throughout the week or concentrated on fewer days.”
And for those of us Who could not do the recommended amount of exercise, neither vigorous nor moderate, neither spread out during the week nor focused on the weekend? Bad news. Higher mortality rates. Notoriously so, but you knew it.
I understand. So I definitely need to get off my ass, but it could be less often and longer. Exactly.
Gave: “And it means less laundering of sportswear. Everyone is a winner, even the planet.”
do not tell: “Actually, I’m a bit busy this Saturday and Sunday. Maybe next weekend…”
