235.Weekend Warriors: How to Stay Active and Healthy with Limited Time

What if I told you that just 7 minutes of movement per day could extend your lifespan? Or that exercising only on weekends provides nearly the same health benefits as daily workouts?

You're not alone if this sounds too good to be true—many high-achieving professionals have been conditioned to believe that exercise requires marathon sessions at the gym or it's not worth doing at all.

Join Dr. Adrienne Youdim as she breaks down the biggest myths about movement and reveals how even small, bite-sized amounts of activity can transform your physical health, mental clarity, and professional performance.

Don't forget to share this episode with friends and colleagues who might benefit from understanding that their body doesn't just need movement—it craves it!

What You'll Learn From This Episode:

• Separate exercise from weight loss expectations: Discover why exercise and weight loss need to "get a divorce" and how this misconception causes people to abandon movement altogether.
• Master the art of "exercise snacking": Explore how 30-second to 5-minute bursts of activity throughout your day can improve cardiovascular function, muscle strength, and blood sugar levels.
• Embrace the weekend warrior approach: Find out how exercising only on weekends can provide nearly the same health benefits as daily exercise, including 20% reduction in high blood pressure and 40% reduction in diabetes risk.
• Implement movement into your busy schedule: Discover practical ways to incorporate activity through dancing to one song, taking stairs, or doing desk exercises that counter sedentary behavior.

"Your body wants you to succeed. Your body is going to work with whatever you give it. Even the littlest form of activity will support you in your health and well-being." — Dr. Adrienne Youdim

Recommended Episode 

• Exercise Snacking: The Quick and Effective Way to Transform Your Body and Mind - https://www.buzzsprout.com/678169/episodes/13436040 

Resource Mentioned:

• Physical Activity Guidelines for Americans  - https://odphp.health.gov/sites/default/files/2019-09/Physical_Activity_Guidelines_2nd_edition.pdf

3 Ways that Dr. Adrienne Youdim Can Support You

• Join Resilient Minds: If this sounds familiar, you're exactly who Resilient Minds is designed for. Next cohort starts September 30th - Limited to 12 high-achieving professionals ready to move from success to significance.
  Ready to stop asking "Is this it?" and start living like you know it isn't?
  Application details here: https://www.dradrienneyoudim.com/resilient-minds
• Subscribe to Dr. Adrienne's weekly newsletter https://www.dradrienneyoudim.com/newsletter.
• Connect on Instagram : Follow @dradrienneyoudim for tips and inspiration on well-being and peak performance.

Transcript

How many of us know, know, know that movement is good for us and still find it hard to get started? If that's you, you are not alone. In fact, less than one in four adults are meeting the recommended guidelines for physical activity. Despite all the evidence showing how powerful it is, for our mind, body, and even our spirit. But here's the good news. Exercise doesn't mean you have to run a marathon or spend hours in the gym. 

Today we're breaking down some of the biggest myths and misunderstandings about movement and sharing simple bite-sized ways to make it more doable, joyful, and sustainable. Because your body doesn't just need movement, it craves movement. And even a little bit goes a long, long way. 

Welcome back to Health Bite. The podcast where we explore the true nutrients that feed you body, mind, and soul. My name is Dr. Adrienne Youdim. I'm your host, a physician, author, and guide for high achieving professionals ready to stop chasing success from a place of depletion and to start living life with vitality, purpose, and intention. After 20 years of medical practice and nearly 50 years as a mere mortal myself, I've learned something powerful. Our hunger isn't just physical, it is emotional, spiritual, and it is a sign that we are not nourishing the parts of ourselves that we need most. 

So here on Health Bite, each week I share with you stories, science, and strategies to help you understand what you're truly hungry for, so you can make the nourishing choices that lead to your own sustainable success. Because when you meet your hunger with clarity, you can fuel your full potential. And this week's nutrient is movement. So let's get to it. So first things first, let's talk about exercise. And I need to start with this. I often say on this podcast, and to my patients actually, that I wish exercise and weight loss would get a divorce. Why? Because in our culture and in our health narrative, we always assume that exercise results in weight loss and we marry the two together when in fact, the studies show that this could not be further from the truth. Weight loss is really dependent on the food that we eat, the calories that we consume, and is not so much affected by exercise. In fact, studies show that exercisers don't really get an extra edge in terms of losing weight. What exercise does do, however, is help us preserve muscle mass or lean body mass while we are dieting or losing weight so that the body preferentially loses fat over muscle. In that way, it helps preserve your metabolism and helps you maintain a healthy weight. But this is why I bring this up. This is why or where it is actually important. Because if we assume that exercise only benefits us in terms of weight loss, and it actually doesn't, then when we don't see the result that we expect, namely the pounds coming off, then we throw in the towel on exercise, which is such an injustice. Because exercise, while it doesn't necessarily help you lose weight, does so much for your mind, your body, and your soul. We know that regular exercise or moving your body, just regular movement, helps with a whole host of physical diseases. In fact, routine exercise reduces your risk of Cardiometabolic disease, like heart attacks, hypertension, reduces cholesterol and the risk of stroke. It also reduces the risk of prediabetes and diabetes. Regular physical activity reduces the risk of numerous cancers. including breast cancer and colon cancer. It's associated with a reduction in dementia and cognitive dysfunction and Alzheimer's disease. It does wonders for our mood. It helps boost mood and reduces the risk of depression and anxiety. It helps strengthen bones and muscles, something that's very important to us all throughout the lifespan, but particularly as we get older, as we age, as we go through menopause. For men, it's super important as well. And it helps preserve bone health so that we preserve our gait and reduce the risk of falls when we get older. So again, exercise is doing so much for your mind and your body. And the good news is that it doesn't take a lot. It doesn't take a lot to actually reap those benefits. Sometimes the narrative is that we need to exercise an hour every day or we need to be going into the gym. While those things may be great, while the benefits are additive, what I'm about to tell you is that really you can appreciate and gain significant health benefits, mind and body, with really small attainable doses of exercise. So let's talk about what the guidelines are. We started the episode saying that less than a quarter of Americans are getting the 2018 recommended guidelines. I know that's already seven years off, but the truth is that the guidelines haven't changed so much since then. And what they recommend is that people get at least 150 minutes a week of moderate activity. What does that mean? 150 minutes really breaks down to 30 minutes five times a week. Just 30 minutes of moderate activity. Moderate activity is the kind of exercise where you're working hard enough to get your heart rate up, you're breathing harder and faster, but you still can't hold like a full-on conversation. And usually moderate activity is one that you start breaking a sweat like around 10 minutes. Now this could be done brisk walking, light jogging, bicycling. It could even be something like gardening that helps you do that. So 150 minutes of moderate activity every week or 75 minutes of vigorous activity per week. So 75 minutes, again, that's just over an hour each week of vigorous exercise. What is considered vigorous? Again, it can be the same kinds of exercises like running, bicycling, playing tennis, for example. But vigorous means that Technically, your heart rate is achieving about 75 to 80% of its max heart rate. Side note here, your max heart rate can be calculated by taking 220, subtracting your age, and then multiplying that by a factor of 75%. or 80%. So multiplying that factor by 0.75, that will get you your max heart rate. But if you're not into math, that's okay, because vigorous activity is the kind of activity that gets you breathless pretty quickly. So you can talk or you can speak like short little phrases, but you can't hold a full conversation if you're exercising vigorously. And it's the kind of activity where you're going to start breaking a sweat. at about two or three minutes. So again, whereas with moderate activity, you're building up a sweat over 10 minutes, with vigorous activity, you're there within minutes. So that's the difference. And again, the guidelines I think are really practical. again 150 minutes or 30 minutes five times a week of moderate activity or 75 minutes just an hour and 15 minutes of vigorous activity every single week Okay, but here's the important point Because your body really wants to succeed your body really wants to conspire in your success and So we know that even if you don't meet these guidelines, that smaller bouts, smaller doses of movement and physical activity can still improve and impact your health. So we're going to talk about some of those things. And we're going to talk about some practical strategies to get it in. I want to start with this. This is a study that, um, I, I present often when I'm, when I'm speaking to my colleagues and to other physicians, there was a study that showed that even seven minutes of activity per day will help, um, improve longevity. So even if you get seven minutes of physical activity per day, really not a significant amount, that in of itself has been shown to prolong your lifespan. And that leads me to the idea of exercise snacks. I love exercise snacks and I've talked about it on this podcast before. In fact, My episode dedicated to exercise snacks is one of the most downloaded Health Bite podcasts. You may want to scroll back and find that particular episode. Super short and sweet and impactful. But I'll give you the lowdown here. So an exercise snack is short intervals of activity, as little as 30 seconds to one minute bouts of activity. done multiple times per day have been shown to have significant health benefits. What this means is like taking a moment to go on a quick brisk walk for a few minutes or taking a minute to walk up and down the stairs in your home or in your workplace or doing some body weight exercises like squats or lunges or push-ups this can be done at your desk this can be done in your kitchen what about dancing to your favorite song like putting one song that you love and committing to dancing to that song several times per day or doing things like jumping jacks or running in place or high knees. Again, there's lots of ways that you can do it. But what the studies show is that these cute little exercise snacks done at 30 second to five minute intervals have been shown to improve your cardiovascular function, improve endurance, improve flexibility, muscle strength. In fact, for people who are desk workers or who have sedentary lifestyles, people who sit at the desk, you know, most hours of the day, it's been shown that sedentary activity, even if you're a regular exerciser, so let's say you start your day doing 30 minutes of exercise, but then you sit at a desk for eight hours, that that sedentary activity for eight hours of your day can be harmful for your health if you don't break it up. Exercise snacking during that eight-hour workday has been shown to counter the negative effects of sedentary behavior, help you preserve muscle mass, and improve all these other factors that I mentioned. And the last one is to also improve blood sugar levels. So we talked early on about how exercise helps with your risk reduction of diabetes. When you do an exercise snack, you help your body metabolize blood sugar, right? Because your body uses glucose to move. It uses sugar to exercise. And so when you engage in these short little snacks, You give your body the opportunity to utilize blood sugar, and by doing so, you reduce blood sugar levels in your system, circulating in your system overall. So I just love this because exercise snacking is so doable. It's so attainable. And who doesn't love a snack, right? You can engage in short bouts of exercise, 30 minutes at a time, I'm sorry, 30 seconds at a time, and you can reap all of these benefits. Another great way of doing this, another great way of getting activity engineered into your busy life is by being a weekend warrior. Now, what is a weekend warrior? A weekend warrior is someone who exercises only on the weekends. So how many of you have tried to get into a daily exercise routine and just can't? Maybe you have to wake up too early to go to work. I have so many clients who live in the West Coast. but keep East Coast hours, which means that they're already waking up at four or five in the morning to start their work day. Or maybe you're not a morning person and you just get home too late from work or by the time you get done with all the errands and family necessities, you're just too spent to get exercise done. But the weekend, that's another story. You can go for a long walk, you can go for a bike ride, you can go for a hike. Well, studies show that weekend warriors actually get a lot of benefit from only exercising on the weekends. And guess what? They can actually get just as much benefit as people who exercise during the week. So there is this massive study that has been done in the UK. They enrolled almost 90,000 individuals. And these were people whose age were averaged at 62 years old. So the beauty of all of this also is that this isn't limited to like younger people. You can get these benefits even if you start in your 40s, 50s, or 60s. So these individuals were tracked for about six and a half years, and they tracked the incidence of almost 700 disease states. So people who were exercising only on the weekends, they were followed for almost seven years, and they looked at their likelihood of developing 678 different disease states. And this is what they found. that the people who exercised only on the weekends actually got a really significant amount of time in. The average amount or the median time to exercise was 288 minutes. So they really got significant amounts of activity by only practicing it on the weekends. The weekend warriors had a reduced risk of developing 264 health conditions compared to the people who exercised every day had a lower risk of 205 conditions. Okay, this is a lot of numbers and so I don't know if it's making your head spin if you're not a auditory learner. But the take home message is that if you're a weekend warrior, you actually can get a significant amount of time in activity. And in doing so, you can still reduce your risk of developing almost 300 medical conditions just by moving one or two days a week. The strongest benefits, of course, came for cardiovascular conditions. We know that our cardiometabolic health is very much linked to activity. They showed that weekend warriors had a 20% reduction in high blood pressure, 40% reduction in diabetes and sleep apnea, and roughly a 50% risk reduction in developing obesity. This is so powerful and the reduction in these weekend warriors were no different than those who exercised throughout the week. So again, if you are not engaged in a regular physical activity practice, if you're not going to the gym every day, if you're not waking up every morning, What this study is telling you is that your body wants you to be successful. Your body is going to work with whatever you give it. And if that means that you can only start by doing something one or two days a week, so be it. You are going to experience health benefits. So here's the thing to remember. Exercise is critical to your health and wellbeing. mind, body and soul. We didn't even get into all of the ways in which moving your body helps productivity and performance in the workplace. There is a lot of data on this and I've done several episodes, uh, limited to, um, specifically talking about exercise. Again, you can go back into our health bite archives and check those out, but Exercising, again, is associated with improved focus in the workplace, greater creativity, higher levels of cognition. I've spoken about my own experience in medical school, how I exercise regularly in order to maintain the focus that I needed. to get the work done, to study. I honestly think that I had some level of ADD or ADHD that was undiagnosed and that I managed it through exercise. I used exercise to help me focus. I also use exercise to manage my anxiety. I was a major worry wart as a child, as a young adult. And to this day, I think if I didn't exercise regularly, I would be a total basket case. So there are benefits to your mental health. There are benefits to your cognitive health. And there are studies that have shown that when people exercise regularly, they perform better on tests than those who do not. There's actually a study that took groups of individuals, they gave them a cognitive test and then had them exercise and then tested them again and showed that the group that actually engaged in physical exercise did better on the retest. than those that did not. So again, really hammering in this message that regular movement or some movement of your body is going to help your physical health, your mental health, your emotional and spiritual health, as well as your professional health. Exercise benefits your body and your mind in tremendous ways, even if you don't lose an ounce. So please don't dismiss the benefit of exercise if you're not losing weight. It doesn't have to be a heavy lift. Again, you can achieve significant benefits from short bouts of activity, whether you decide to engage in exercise snacks or become a weekend warrior, your body wants you to succeed. So do something, do anything, because even the littlest form of activity will support you in your health and well-being. I hope that this has inspired you to make some small bites, some small changes into your life, into your lifestyle, small changes that again are going to give you huge returns and impact. I appreciate you joining me this week on Health BiteIf this episode nourished you, please share it with a friend or leave a review to help others find the science and soul of true health and wellbeing. If you want more support, please visit me at dradrianudine.com. There you can sign up for my newsletter. You can explore programs and keynotes and my signature resilient minds course that begins this September, September 30th, and remember that your hunger is not a flaw, it is an invitation. Because when you meet your needs with intention, you unlock your greatest potential. See you here next week on Health Bite.