Exercise Snacks to Increase Physical Activity
Posted in Wellness on Jun 12, 2024
A lot of people feel there is not enough time in the day to get through all they need to do, let alone find the time to exercise. This can make people feel helpless when it comes to improving their health and stopping unwanted weight gain.
When it comes to your health, one thing is clear, any amount of physical activity or exercise is good for you and better than no physical activity at all.
Keeping this in mind, what if I told you there was a way to be more physically active and exercise without having to plan dedicated time to get to a gym or even leave home or the workplace. This is where I would like to introduce you to exercise snacks.
Just like food snacks give you a chance to eat a little bit of food when you don’t have time for full meals on a busy day, exercise snacks allow you to exercise for very short periods of time throughout a busy day.
You may be wondering what exactly would be considered an exercise snack and how can I use them? Let me explain...
Any exercise session that lasts 1 minute or less would be considered an exercise snack. The whole idea being that these very short bursts of exercise are time efficient and this makes it more achievable to people who are crunched for time. Some examples of exercise snacks would be walking quickly up and down the office, stair climbing or even doing a few repetitions of body-weight exercises at your desk.
A simple way to use exercise snacks could be to perform 1 minute of one of the examples mentioned above after 1 hour of sitting and then return to your work. You would repeat the same exercise every 1 to 3 hours until the end of the day. It doesn’t even have to be the exact same exercise each time, you could alternate between different exercises 1 to 2 times per day if you wanted to have some variety.
The best thing is that you can use any exercise you would like, preferably something that gets your heart rate up, such as jumping jacks or marching on the spot, or challenges your muscles slightly, like body-weight squats, lunges or push ups or even a stretch or two. By following this approach, you would accumulate 3 to 8 minutes of exercise in one work day, and over a week you would accumulate between 15 to 40 minutes of exercise per a week that you otherwise would not have. You can see by regularly doing exercise snacks just how quickly the amount of physical activity you are able to do starts to add up.
For overall health it is becoming clearer that breaking up time spent sitting during the day is beneficial. Even if you are someone who does go to gym regularly or plays sports often, exercise snacks are a great way to break up your daily sitting time.
In a perfect world we would like everyone to exercise most days of the week, making use of a variety of types of exercise, such as resistance training and cardiovascular exercise, as well as exercise snacks during the day. The reason for this is that the more active you can be, the greater the health benefits.
As this is not always possible, try making use of exercise snacks as they need very little time and are a great way to add exercise into your daily routine. As I mentioned before, every bit of exercise counts when it comes to improving your health.
By David Britz - Biokineticist at P14
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