Athlete health: does training frequency matter?

There are many reasons why people become involved in sport. For some, it’s simply a continuation of sporting activity they once enjoyed at school, college or university. For many others, especially those who take up endurance sports such as running, cycling or triathlon later in life, maintaining or improving health is an important motivator. This motivation could be anything from wanting to shed a few excess pounds to needing to build up cardiovascular fitness following a health scare. Over time of course, many athletes get hooked and participate in sport just because they love it! However, the continuing health benefits of training remain a powerful background motivator, especially for athletes of more advanced years.

Exercise frequency and health

According to many health experts, exercising regularly on most days of the week is recommended to get the maximum health benefits. Indeed, the official guidelines on exercise and health issued by the American College of Sports Medicine and CDC state that: ‘All healthy adults aged 18–65 years should participate in moderate intensity aerobic physical activity for a minimum of 30 minutes on five days per week, or vigorous intensity aerobic activity for a minimum of 20 minutes on three days per week’⁽¹⁾.

The reasoning for these recommendations comes from epidemiological studies on exercise habits and cardiovascular health. For example, a large 2020 study in the European Heart Journal looked at the relationship between the frequency of moderate to vigorous physical activity with cardiovascular disease, especially in older adults⁽²⁾. It found that compared to those who were continuously physically inactive, those who increased their frequency of exercise from physically inactive to 1-2 times per week experienced a drop of 0.7 adverse cardiovascular events per 1000 ‘person-years’. However, increasing the exercise frequency to 3-4 times per week resulted in a drop of 1.5 cardiovascular events per 1000 person-years – ie a halving of the risk compared to training 1-2 times per week.

What about weekend warriors?

The recommendations on exercise frequency are widely accepted, but there are many athletes who, for various reasons, are unable to train regularly through the week and instead have to ‘concentrate’ their training into one or two days – for example, over the weekend. This is often the case for those who are travelling in the week, or have onerous work or family commitments for much of the week. Or it may even be simply that the working day plus commute is long, and in the winter months, it’s just too dark or icy to venture out before or after work, and there’s no easily accessible gym facility nearby. In these circumstances, many athletes take advantage of their free time during the precious days off and cram in a large volume of exercise into just one or two days. But what are the implications for health for these ‘weekend warriors’? Can the relatively large volume of exercise performed in just one or two days help offset the lack of frequency, or are these athletes missing out on health benefits?

New research

Much of the previous research on exercise and health has investigated exercise frequency or total exercise time accumulated per week. But what has not been done is to look at exercise distribution – ie compared the health benefits of shorter, frequent bouts of exercise distributed evenly through the week, with a similar volume of exercise performed in one or maybe two chunks at the weekend – the so-called weekend warrior scenario. However, a new study on this topic by a team of US scientists based at Massachusetts General Hospital has just been published in the journal ‘Circulation’⁽³⁾.