Turns out, there might be another solution for staying healthy when it feels like youdon’t have time to exercise. The evidence for short bursts of activity has been mounting for some time. (Remember the 7-minute workout?) But now there’s research showing that even really small sessions can have bona fide benefits. They’re called exercise snacks. “And they’re somewhere between that short walk to the water cooler in pre-pandemic times and high-intensity interval training,” saysScott Lear, Ph.D., the Pfizer/Heart and Stroke Foundation Chair in Cardiovascular Prevention Research at St. Paul’s Hospital in Vancouver. Think: challenging enough to jack up your heart rate, but only a minute or less at a time—such as 20 seconds of squat jumps, stair climbing, burpees or a fast 60-second run down your block.
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Currentexercise guidelinescall for at least 150 minutes of moderate-intensity exercise or 75 minutes of vigorous exercise a week (or a combination of the two), which is a far cry from what you’d get from an exercise snack. But doing a few micro workouts can be a good alternative for those days you can’t fit in your regular routine. “The message now is anything is better than nothing, and every little bit counts,” says Gibala.
No matter your fitness level, exercise snacks are an option for everyone. While inactive people stand to gain the most from them, Gibala says that even gym-going folks with desk jobs can reap the rewards. “Structured daily exercise doesn’t negate the harmful effects of sitting for much of the day,” he explains. “So these snacks can help break up sedentary periods.”
Preliminary research suggests that among people who typically sit for eight hours per day, those who completed five 4-second cycling sprints every hour during the workday (for a total of 160 seconds of exercise) had 31% lower triglyceride levels and 43% higher body-fat metabolism the next day. How’s that for a satisfying snack?
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