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Fitting an hour-long workout into your day can be tricky for a lot of people. Fortunately, lengthy sessions at the gym aren’t a prerequisite of a successful and sustainable exercise plan.
If you spend most of your days sitting at a desk and struggling to find time to move, “exercise snacking” could be the perfect solution. The fitness trend requires committing to a few short bouts of activity throughout the day – think a snack, instead of a full meal – and it offers plenty of benefits.
A small study conducted by the University of Essex found that just 16 minutes of bodyweight exercises like squats and lunges, spread across a standard eight-hour work day, helped subjects strengthen their muscles and boost their balance over the course of four weeks.
And a 2022 article, published in the Exercise and Sport Sciences Review, found positive impacts from even shorter bursts of activity – namely, 15-30 seconds of vigorous-intensity exercises such as cycling or stair climbing, three times per day. It concluded that this strategy was effective at “improving cardiorespiratory fitness and exercise performance in inactive adults”.
In short, treating your workouts like little snacks and peppering them throughout your day, rather than going for a full 45 minute, one hour, or longer session daily, could improve your strength, flexibility and longevity dramatically.
If that impressive list of benefits has piqued your interest and you’re short on time but want to get a workout in, read on. Below, we speak to three experts on walking, stretching and strength training, and task each with sharing a few simple exercise snacking ideas for Independent readers to try.
Walking
For some, a walk is the ideal way to keep fit. It’s cheap, easy to do and boasts a raft of benefits. It’s also a great option if you want to jump on the exercise snacking trend.
“It’s a good general recommendation for anyone to exercise throughout the day,” says Dr Elroy Aguiar, an assistant professor of exercise science at The University of Alabama with a specialism in all things step-based.
“Some new research that’s come out in the last couple of years is actually saying that sedentary time, sitting down for long periods, can be offset by doing large amounts of exercise. But ideally you should have less sedentary time and lower amounts of aerobic or resistance training exercise [throughout the day]. That’s the ideal combination.”
Walking is one of the most accessible ways to do this: you don’t need any equipment, and you can do it pretty much anywhere.
“You don’t need to think about those breaks in sedentary time as ‘exercise’, it’s more like purposeful movement in between bouts of doing things,” advises Dr Aguiar. “For example, parking your car a little bit further away than the car park that’s immediately by your office, or using public transport and getting off one stop early.”
“It’s more about thinking of activity as a choice throughout the day: building in movement wherever possible rather than thinking ‘I have to have an hour to exercise, otherwise I’m not doing any’.”
His second piece of advice is to be mindful of the intensity of this purposeful movement. If you’re walking, that might mean picking up the pace slightly – Dr Aguiar’s research points to a cadence of 100 steps per minute being representative of moderate-intensity.
The World Health Organisation (WHO) recommends at least 150 minutes of moderate-intensity physical activity per week, and promises “significant physical and mental health benefits from regular exercise”. If you can chip away at this target with a brisk walk a few times each day, you’ll be well on your way.
So, try incorporating a few faster-paced walks into your day to enjoy health perks such as increased energy expenditure and improved cardiovascular fitness.
Strength training
Strength training lays the foundations of a fit and functional body, not only helping you build strength and muscle, but also increasing your mobility, bone density and joint health to minimise injury risk. And you don’t need to pump iron for hours on end to achieve this.
“Many people believe you need a 60-minute-plus session to feel the benefits of exercise, but nothing could be further from the truth,” says Raquel Sanjurjo, a gym-owner and personal trainer with more than a decade of experience.
“Studies show that as long as there is enough stimulus across the week, your strength and muscle will increase. It doesn’t matter if you do it in a 90-minute window or in 10-minute blocks spread throughout the day. Just try to hit all of the muscle groups [the chest, back, shoulders, arms, legs and core] for four to eight sets each week, then get ready for the gains.”
Sanjurjo recommends using the two routines below when you’re short on time and don’t have any equipment to hand.
In five or 10 minutes, depending on the time you have available, complete as many rounds as possible of the following circuit:
- Squat x20
- Sit-up x15
- Jumping lunge x10 (five on each side)
- Hand-release press-up x5
If you can’t perform a press-up, you can make this exercise easier by placing your hands on an elevated surface like a sturdy chair or your desk. You can also swap the jumping lunges for standard lunges if you prefer low-impact workouts.
Stretching
If you’re looking for a more relaxed way to add some extra movement into your day, stretching is a top option. Stretching can also help with mobility later in life and help you maintain more independence as you age.
“For most people, the biggest benefit they’re going to get from stretching is that feeling of losing restriction and [gaining that] freedom to be able to move,” says flexibility expert and Bodyweight Warrior founder Tom Merrick.
A sedentary lifestyle can have the opposite effect, leading to a downturn in flexibility, according to the Harvard Medical School so if you can make short stretching sessions a part of your exercise snacking routine, you’ll reap the rewards for years to come.
“If you’re sitting a lot in the day, you’re going to get some compression and tightness of the glutes, and they then have an impact on other lower body positions like the squat,” Merrick says. “Loosening the hips really helps to unlock things. The hip flexors tend to be tight on a lot of people.”
In the clip below, he shares five stretches he does every day. There are two to specifically target the hips – the couch stretch and 90/90 – and this pair can be done pretty much anywhere. The squat and elephant walk are accessible too, loosening tight hips and hamstrings, but you’ll need a pull-up bar to perform the hang for healthier shoulders and decompression of the spine.
Try holding each stretch for 60 seconds for some respite from your usual posture at your desk.
How to use exercise snacking
Exercise snacking is a great way to introduce more movement into your day, especially if you’re someone who struggles to find time to work out. Above, you’ll find all the ingredients you need to give it a try.
The main appeal of exercise snacking is its accessibility – there’s no point committing to an itinerary you know you won’t stick to. Instead, start with just one or two short bouts of exercise per day, prioritising things that are achievable, enjoyable and make you feel good – this is the key to making an exercise plan stick.
When you’re consistently completing these sessions, you can slowly try adding more in, with the end goal of hitting the 150-minutes of moderate-intensity activity (or 75-minutes of vigorous-intensity activity) per week championed by the WHO and NHS.
And there you have it, a bite-sized answer to your workout woes and a great place to start if you’re new to exercise, or getting back into it.
Read more: What is interval training and is it right for everyone?
