This meta-analysis compared weekend warrior and regularly active activity patterns in adults with a mean age of 40 or more. Weekend warriors concentrate their weekly activity into few days, while the regularly active spread it across the week. Five databases were searched to April 2025, with forward-citation and hand-search checks to March 2026. Three direct estimates (N = 452,513) gave a pooled all-cause mortality hazard ratio of 1.019 (95% CI 0.851-1.221). Six further comparisons, rebuilt from separately reported estimates, also showed no clear difference, whatever correlation between those estimates was assumed. Certainty was very low, and weekly moderate-to-vigorous activity volume was not uniformly matched between patterns.
Why it is interesting: Concentrating the week's activity into few days showed no clear mortality penalty in the direct cohort data. The authors stress this does not establish equivalence, as only three direct estimates were available.
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