People often ask me: what’s the best exercise to do? My answer is always the same: the best exercise is the one you will do.
Most of us are trying to fit in eight hours of sleep, eat meals made from whole foods rather than ultra-processed products and meet the recommended target of 150 minutes of cardiovascular exercise and two strength training sessions each week. All of this is on top of holding down a full-time job and managing family life. Gone are the days of eight hours of work, eight hours of sleep and eight hours of recreation.
For too long, we have treated exercise as a leisure activity – something we do for pleasure or enjoyment. At times, it is even seen as vanity. As a result, exercise often falls to the bottom of our daily to-do list and is usually the first thing to go when life gets busy.
We need to rethink this approach. Exercise should be a health priority because it is one of the biggest investments we can make in our future. There’s little point putting money into a pension or paying off a mortgage if we’re not healthy enough to enjoy it later in life.
The evidence supporting exercise is overwhelming. Regular physical activity helps keep our hearts and lungs healthy, but the benefits go much further. Exercise has been shown to help prevent certain cancers and improve treatment outcomes. It reduces the risk of fractures, particularly in the hips and spine, supports people with depression and anxiety and can help prevent, manage and, in some cases, reverse type 2 diabetes.
However, recognising that exercise should be a priority and actually making it one are two very different things. For some people, fitting regular exercise into the working week is simply not realistic.
Weekend warriors can still benefit
The good news is that being a weekend warrior can still provide significant health benefits. This approach involves completing the recommended 150 minutes of moderate to vigorous cardiovascular exercise over the course of a weekend rather than spreading it throughout the week.
Research shows that people who meet activity guidelines experience lower rates of disease and mortality regardless of whether they spread exercise across the week or concentrate it into one or two days. Both approaches are far better than being inactive. Put simply, something is always better than nothing.
There are, however, a few important considerations.
Firstly, completing 150 minutes of exercise in a short period places greater demands on the body. Joints, muscles and connective tissues experience higher loads with less recovery time, increasing the risk of overload and injury.
If you only exercise at weekends, it’s worth spending a few minutes warming up beforehand and stretching afterwards. Dynamic warm-up exercises help activate muscles and prepare joints for movement, while gentle static stretches can help reduce stiffness afterwards.
The best warm-up will depend on the activity you are doing. If you are running or cycling, focus on mobilising your hips, knees and ankles with leg swings, walking lunges and hip rotations. Activating the gluteal muscles is particularly important because many of us spend most of the week sitting. Exercises such as crab walks, monster walks and fire hydrants are all effective options.
If you’re playing tennis or attending a fitness class, include arm circles, shoulder rotations and gentle neck movements. Wall push-ups and tricep dips can also help activate the muscles around the shoulders. Here’s our video of a general dynamic warm-up routine to get the joints and muscles moving.
Training adaptations are also less effective when exercise is performed infrequently. To improve fitness, flexibility or strength, the body benefits from being challenged regularly. Weekend-only exercise can improve health, but it’s less likely to result in significant fitness gains and may increase the likelihood of injury.
Keep moving during the week
Secondly, exercising intermittently can make it harder to maintain stable metabolic health. Regular activity helps regulate blood sugar, insulin levels, blood pressure and cholesterol. Longer periods of inactivity followed by intense exercise may lead to greater fluctuations in these markers.
Research also shows that regular exercise positively influences other health behaviours, particularly our eating habits. To get the most from weekend workouts, it’s important to make healthy choices throughout the week rather than relying on exercise to offset poor habits.
The same applies to sleep. Many busy people burn the candle at both ends during the week and try to catch up at weekends. Unfortunately, this approach is not good for long-term health. Healthy habits are easier to maintain when they are practised consistently.
Even if you can only exercise at weekends, try to include movement throughout the week. Think of these as movement snacks: small bursts of activity performed regularly throughout the day.
Recent research suggests that people who leave their desks and move for five minutes every hour report improved productivity, lower fatigue levels and better mood compared with those who remain sedentary.
Other useful movement snacks include taking the stairs, walking up escalators, walking short distances instead of driving, standing during phone calls, performing sit-to-stand exercises while reading emails, stretching whenever you visit the bathroom and holding walking or standing meetings where possible.
Fitting 150 minutes of exercise into a busy life is not easy, unless you’re a supermodel or an elite athlete. Do what you can, when you can, knowing that something is always better than nothing. Once you start experiencing the benefits, you may find it easier to make time for exercise elsewhere in the week.
Claire Small
Claire Small is the Chief Clinical Officer and Co-founder of Pure Sports Medicine. As well as delivering expert Physiotherapy programmes from Pure Sports Medicine’s Kensington Clinic, Claire is also an Honorary Lecturer and Examiner at Queen Mary University of London, Invited Lecturer at UCL and Kings College in London and University of Bath, and a national and international lecturer on manual therapy, spinal, hip, and pelvic pain. Claire’s written career includes being a journal reviewer for Manual Therapy and Physical Therapy in Sport, and The British Journal of Sports Medicine.
