The Shocking Truth About Weekend Warrior Fitness Gains

If you are like most adult runners, you are pretty busy during the week.

It can be hard to find the time to squeeze in a quality run or workout between Monday and Friday. It’s pretty tempting to put off your quality work and your mileage until the weekend, then cram in all the running you can do on Saturday and Sunday.

You’ve probably been guilty of that from time to time, but is it really that bad for you?

Weekend Warrior Surprise

There are certainly a lot of “weekend warriors” out there who get fit by logging most of their training time on the weekends. Today, we’ll be looking at a clever scientific study that explored this topic.

The study, published in 2006 by Tim Meyer and other researchers at the University of Saarland in Germany, attempted to test whether a “weekend warrior” style training program was less beneficial in terms of fitness gained over a twelve-week training program.¹

Meyers and his coworkers recruited thirty-eight men and women who were healthy but untrained, splitting them into three groups equally-matched in terms of age, sex, and aerobic fitness.

The first group served as a control; they underwent no training during the duration of the twelve-week study. The second group took on a fairly standard endurance training program, which called for 30 minutes of training at 90% of the anaerobic threshold five days a week. The third group was assigned a “weekend warrior” style training program, which involved doing two sessions of 75 minutes at the same intensity (90% of anaerobic threshold).

In keeping with the weekend warrior philosophy, these days had to be completed back-to-back. It’s notable that this is the exact same weekly volume of training—150 minutes—as the standard-training group, but done only in two days as opposed to five.

All three groups took a VO₂ max test on a treadmill at the beginning of the study. The two exercising groups were given a heart rate monitor to use to ensure their training was at the appropriate intensity.

Finally, after twelve weeks of training, all of the subjects, including the control group, returned for another round of VO₂ max testing.

The results were surprising: despite cramming all of their training into just two days per week, the subjects in the weekend warrior group improved their VO₂ max just as much as those doing regular training.

In fact, though the results did not reach statistical significance, their gains were slightly higher than the regular-training group! Both training groups were able to exercise at the same intensity with a lower heart rate than at the outset of the study, and, not surprisingly, the control group’s fitness stagnated.

What should you make of this?

Even with these results, it’s hard to whole-heartedly endorse cramming most or all of your running into two super-long workouts on Saturday and Sunday. But it does indicate that, at least for untrained people, total weekly volume of training is more important than how you go about doing it. Whether the same approach would work for a better-trained athlete is still up in the air.

If you are pressed for time during the week, you might be able to reap most or all of the benefits of standard training by compressing more of your “quality and quantity” running into Saturday and Sunday.

Higher Risk of Injury?

However, there is some other research that indicates doing so might increase your injury risk—a 1989 study of over 1600 runners in Ontario, Canada found that running more miles per day on running days, and running very far on your longest weekly run, were both associated with a higher risk of injury.² To stay healthy, maybe consistency is better.

Meyer et al.’s study suggests that getting in high-volume workouts on Saturday and Sunday might be just as beneficial as spreading out your running out during the week, but don’t expect to be feeling very fresh come Monday!

Conclusion

You should always remember the principle of stress and recovery: if you put a lot of stress on your body by running, say, a high-volume fartlek session on Saturday and a long run on Sunday, you need extra time to recover afterwards.