Weekend Physical Activity Could Be Saving Your Life
PHILADELPHIA (CBS)—New research suggests those who workout only two sessions a week are lowing their risk of dying over the next decade, compared to those who exercise more often.
CBS News reports even people who get less exercise than recommended have less risk than folks who don't break a sweat at all.
"If someone is completely inactive, the best thing they can do is even getting out and taking a walk," said Hannah Arem, a health researcher at George Washington University. For people who think they don't have enough time for small amounts of exercise to matter, the results are "encouraging or perhaps motivating," she said.
Arem wrote about the study with the results released Monday in JAMA Internal Medicine.
Researchers at Loughborough University in England used surveys by trained interviewers on nearly 64,000 adults in England and Scotland from 1994 to 2008. By last year, 8,802 had died.
Participants were grouped according to how much exercise they said they got the preceding month:
-Inactive (no leisure time exercise), 63 percent.
-Regular exercisers (meet the guidelines), 11 percent.
-Weekend warriors (get the recommended weekly amount but in one or two sessions), 4 percent.
-Insufficiently active (get less than the recommended weekly amount), 22 percent.
The results showed that Weekend warrior and other leisure time physical activity patterns characterized by 1 or 2 sessions per week may be sufficient to reduce death risk.
READ MORE on the study HERE.
