Don’t have time to work out during the week? That’s actually OK

Enlarge (credit: Getty | Guido De Bortoli )

Your workout schedule may have just gotten a lot more flexible: that is, whether you try to fit in a brisk exercise routine every day before dinner or just go big on the weekends after sitting at your 9-to-5 all week—it may not actually matter to your overall health.

Looking at the health data of about 64,000 adults over 18 years, British researchers found that any exercise—however little or infrequent—was still linked to reduced risks of death from cardiovascular disease and cancer. The findings, which appear this week in JAMA Internal Medicine, beef up the idea that there is no “right” way to dole out exercise in your weekly schedule and that there’s no threshold of activity at which health benefits kick in.

“Some leisure time physical activity is better than none,” the authors, led by exercise and health expert Gary O’Donovan of Loughborough University, concluded. More exercise is better, of course. But for those who hit overall weekly goals for activity, “frequency and duration [of workouts] did not matter,” in terms of achieving those health benefits.