Exercise Snacking For Your Health
“Just get 150 minutes of exercise per week”
“Make sure you’re walking 10K steps a day”
“Aim to get at least a 25-minute workout into your daily schedule.”
There’s pressure to get enough exercise coming from all angles. Whether it’s the formal CDC recommendation of 150 minutes of physical activity each week, or the new trend of getting 10,000 steps each day, there are benchmarks we should all reach for to benefit our health. In a perfect world, it’d be easy to meet those metrics, but with managing work, kids’ schedules, mealtimes, and more, exercise is the first thing to fall off the docket for many of us.
That’s where personal trainer Lavina Mehta’s concept of exercise snacking comes to the rescue.
Exercise snacking takes a concept we know and love – snacking – and applies it to physical activity. To properly snack on exercise, you incorporate short sets of movement throughout the day, which helps to increase your overall movement and boost your health. An exercise snack can be as short as 30 seconds or as long as 10 minutes; essentially, it’s short enough that you don’t have to formally schedule it. It works for two reasons:
- Trying to schedule enough exercise simply isn’t attainable for many people due to busy schedules. With exercise snacking, you’re doing snippets of movement when you have the time, accumulating it throughout the day rather than all at once.
- Movement is movement! Your body was created to move regularly, not exist in the sedentary lifestyles so many of us follow. Exercise snacking allows your body to routinely move and break out of a slumped office lifestyle.
Some research suggests that small bursts of exercise can reap big health benefits. A small cohort study from UT Austin had women completing intense, four second bursts of exercise, followed by a resting time of 15-30 seconds. The women repeated this 30 times to complete the workout. In total, they only did about 2 minutes of vigorous exercise, with 7-15 minutes spent in the rest period. The researchers found that doing this three times per week significantly improved the women’s cardiovascular health, particularly when looking at their blood volume and VO2 peak (a good indicator of how well your body can handle cardio activities).
In short? If you need to take breaks while you work out AND you need something super short in your schedule (less than 10 minutes!), try short bursts of exercise followed by rest periods – it really will make a difference to your health.
Another study explored how vigorous intermittent lifestyle physical activity (VILPA) affected overall health. VILPA refers to the daily forms of exercise you get from your day-to-day life; this could be walking up the stairs, lifting heavy boxes at work, running around with your kids, that kind of thing. It’s the amount of built-in exercise snacks you get in a day. The researchers investigated how VILPA correlated with deaths from cancer and cardiovascular disease and found that more VILPA in daily life was associated with less death from CVD and cancer.
In other words, here’s the skinny: consider how you can build more intense physical activity into your lifestyle!
The research shows exercise snacking can be effective, and thankfully, there are a variety of ways you can do it. Check out the list below to get your ideas churning!
1. Stretch first thing when you wake up
Mehta recommends weaving movement into your morning schedule. Mornings can be the most chaotic time of day, but for some people, it’s also the time when you have the most robust schedule (for example, maybe you always make your coffee before you wake up the kids). Consider where you can take some time to do a sun salutation, which is a yoga flow where you…
- Stand tall with your feet together and hands at your sides and then reach your arms up to the sky.
- Allow your arms to float down to the ground and bring your torso with it, doing a standing forward fold (just like in gym class – touch your toes!)
- Walk your feet back into plank position, holding the position for a few extra breaths if you want to get your blood pumping.
- Lower your body to the ground with your hands by your shoulders, and push your head and neck up into a small back arch.
- Lift your hips up to form a triangle shape with your body and the ground (a position called downward dog).
- Walk your feet forward towards your hands, and return to standing again.
You can watch how to do it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FPjppcOquE4
Repeat a sun salutation 1-5 times in the morning to get your body moving and stretching before the day begins. Also, Yoga with Adriene is a popular yoga teacher on YouTube who offers video classes as short as 5 minutes. You can try her 5-minute morning yoga below:
2. Consider desk exercises
Stuck in a desk chair all day? There are a few ways you can exercise snack from your office, too.
- Try calf raises while seated
Dr. Jessie Inchauspé, author of Glucose Revolution, is a huge proponent of doing soleus raises during the workday if you have a sedentary lifestyle. The soleus is the muscle right under the meaty part of your calf (the meaty part – what you see when someone has particularly muscular calves – is primarily the gastrocnemius). Working your soleus muscle can expend a high amount of energy and stabilize your blood sugar after a big meal, all while allowing you to exercise rather inconspicuously at work.
To do a soleus raise while sitting, put your feet flat on the floor with your knees at a 90 degree angle. Lift your heels while keeping your toes on the floor. Relax your muscles and allow your heels to passively return to the floor. Repeat this for a few minutes while working to properly exercise snack on soleus raises!
See the diagram below from We Be Fit for a view of how to do a soleus raise (also sometimes called a soleus push up).
- Lift dumbbells (or other items around you) while on calls or doing handsfree activities
No formal instruction or steps are needed here. How often are you on Zoom calls with no video, or talking on the phone with a boss? If you don’t need your hands to take notes, use this as a time to do bicep curls. You can keep small dumbbells in your office, or you can simply use a full water bottle, heavy book, paperweight or another item in your office with decent weight on it.
Get creative in the moments when you find yourself sitting handsfree! It’s the perfect time to exercise snack.
- Take a 45-second movement break once an hour
In an 8-hour work day, aim to spend about a minute each hour doing movement. This could be knocking out a few squats, doing press-ups on your desk, or practicing the bicep curls or soleus raises mentioned above.
More regular movement is good to help increase the amount of physical activity you get, but it also helps regulate your blood sugar. If there’s something you do regularly at work – sending emails for example – you could consider doing a few squats or soleus raises every time you send an email. Think about how you can build movement into your regular work schedule and pair it with other habits!
3. Opt for movement-focused lifestyle changes
These ideas will sound more familiar, but it’s a good reminder to do things like…
- Taking the stairs instead of the elevator
- Choosing a game like tag to do with your kids/grandkids during playtime
- Moving your body while you watch TV! March in place, do tricep dips on the couch, knock out a few crunches – aim to add in a few minutes of exercise while Netflixing, too!
- Walking during your lunch break
Consider where you’ve been taking shortcuts in movement and replace them with physical activity when possible, making exercise snacks a routine part of your lifestyle! It can be hard to get enough exercise – it’s an issue many of us face. However, you don’t always need to schedule a 90-minute fitness class or carve out 60-minutes each day at the gym. If those things aren’t accessible to you right now, add in a few ideas like these to practice exercise snacking, boosting your overall health and making movement a priority in your life.
