"Its the person who wakes up at the crack of dawn on the weekend puts on shiny spandex and disappears with a mountain bike for hours at a time. Its the guy who heads to the pool one night a week and endures a workout that might make Michael Phelps gasp for air. Its the weekly rock climbers and double spin classtakers schvitzing their Sunday away. These weekend warriors cram the recommended amount of exercise into one or two days while the rest of us faithfully head to the gym multiple times a week for a halfhour hamster run on the treadmill. A paper published January  in JAMA Internal Medicine httpjamanetwork.comjournalsjamainternalmedicinefullarticle.jamainternmed.. suggests these warriors may be onto something. In a study based on nearly  adults researchers in the U.K. found that weekend exercise appears to be just as effective at preventing heart disease and cancer as exercise done more frequently. This is great news for anyone who feels too busy on weekdays to work out but enjoys outdoor activity on the weekend. I think that the weekend warrior physical activity pattern is beneficial because they are actually doing a large proportion of vigorous intensity activity. And vigorous activity makes you fit and fitness reduces your risk of disease and death says Gary ODonovan a researcher in physical activity and sedentary behavior at Englands Loughborough University and lead author of the paper. ODonovan and fellow researchers looked at data on middleaged adults who responded to a governmentsponsored household survey conducted from  to . The survey included questions about health history and fitness habits. The researchers then crossreferenced this information with health department death records.    They found the risk of death from all causes was about  percent lower for weekend warriors compared with adults who maintained a sedentary lifestyle. And the warriors had a  percent lower risk of cardiovascular death and an  percent lower risk for cancerrelated death. The mortality rates of weekend warriors were roughly the same as those who claimed to exercise more than two days a week but for shorter durations. However there are also some limitations to this study the researchers say. More than  percent of the subjects were white. The information about physical activity was reported by the participants and its likely that many were too generous in their estimates of how much time they spent at the gym. Unfortunately taking  minutes in locker room to put on your sneakers doesnt count as a workout. Its recommended that people get  minutes or two and half hours of exercise each week based on guidelines from the American Heart Association http_UCM__Article.jsp the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention https and other medical authorities. This could be something as simple as a brisk walk or other lowimpact options for vigorous exercise about  minutes a day. Experts often encourage recreational athletes to not exercise more than an hour a day. In theory someone who did one bout of  minutes of moderate exercise is a weekend warrior says ODonovan. This study shows that it doesnt matter how you decide to split up the recommended weekly amount of exercise. You just need to do it. However experts caution that it is possible to overdo it and more exercise than two and a half hours a week can actually be unhelpful and even harmful. One study published in  in the journal Heart httpheart.bmj.comcontentearlyheartjnl.abstract suggests that in people with existing heart disease the risk for cardiac arrest and stroke was the same for people who exercised more than an hour a day compared with those who didnt exercise at all. The coronary heart disease patients who stuck with the recommended  minutes a week had the lowest risk for heart attack and stroke.   There are risks that come with a weekend warrior exercise schedule especially for people who arent used to being active. I would be more concerned about whats happening at the point of exercisenot the longterm benefits says Dr. Howard Andrew Selinger chair of family medicine at Quinnipiac University. He says someone who is not in good shape is at risk for sudden cardiac arrest or acute injury such as spraining muscles or putting too much stress on joints. ODonovan encourages aspiring weekend warriors to start slowly to avoid any health problems. He says middleaged adults should exercise moderately during the first  weeks and then slowly build up to more vigorous activity."