Fitness
What's in your day? Scientists have analysed how we should spend our time for optimum health
It’s known as the “Goldilocks day”: the “just right” way to allocate your time to various activities for optimal health.
Sounds like a handy guide to life, right? But is it even possible?
We already have guidelines around how much physical activity adults should get each week. So how many hours each day should we spend standing, sitting or sleeping?
New Australian research published in Diabetologica provides an hour-by-hour breakdown of daily activities to reduce the risk of cardiometabolic diseases, which include disorders of the heart, diabetes and chronic kidney disease.
Loading…
The study, from Swinburne University and the Baker Heart and Diabetes Institute, analysed more than 2,000 people in the Netherlands, 684 of whom had type 2 diabetes.
Over seven days, they had their waist circumference, blood glucose and insulin levels, cholesterol, blood pressure and triglycerides (a type of fat found in blood) measured.
By examining how participants with the healthiest results divvied up their time, the researchers came up with what they say is an optimum day for cardiometabolic health.
Christian Brakenridge from Swinburne’s Centre for Urban Transitions led the research, and says the activity plan is “like a North Star” — something to aim towards.
“I think people might kind of baulk at the idea of these strong quantitative guidelines, but the take home message here is we really want people to sit less, move more and sleep for appropriate durations,” Dr Brakenridge says.
The average Australian sits for about eight hours a day but desk-based office workers can spend around 10 hours seated.
And most of us only get two hours of physical activity each day (that’s light and moderate activity combined), which is about half of what the study recommends.
Light physical activity includes slow walking or doing chores, and moderate to vigorous activity can be brisk walking, jogging or difficult tasks like shovelling.
Dot Dumuid is a time-use epidemiologist at the University of South Australia. For years she’s studied the healthiest ways to spend our time.
She provided statistics for the new study, and noted its narrow focus on cardiometabolic risk factors.
“I like when studies put other outcomes in there as well, like cognition, for example.”
Dr Dumuid says very few study participants managed four hours of activity day in, day out.
“There’d be a few super-achievers … but that’s not feasible for heaps of people.
“You could do it, but you’d have to give up something else.”
And that activity trade-off is where things get interesting.
Adjusting the levers of your life
The perfect day for your heart might be quite different to the perfect day for your brain.
Dr Dumuid has studied the “optimum” 24 hours for a range of health outcomes, and is particularly interested in what happens when you take time from one category and put it in another.
For example, physical activity is great for heart health. But if it comes at the cost of sleep, Dr Dumuid says that can be detrimental for those with anxiety and depression.
And people need to spend more hours sitting than moving if they want to optimise academic performance and cognitive function, as that’s when we usually do things like study, read or play music.
While Dr Dumuid is yet to come up with a “Goldilocks day” for adults, she has one that she says is most beneficial for the mental, physical and cognitive function of children aged 11 and 12.
But even with children, priorities can shift, and if exams are approaching, a student might need to temporarily adjust the dial to manage their time differently.
To help with this, Dr Dumuid developed an online tool which lets students rank what’s most important to them to give a more personalised 24-hour breakdown.
“One size rarely fits all in population health,” she says.
More than one optimum day
No matter how much time we want to invest in being happy and healthy, not everyone has complete agency over how they spend their day.
There can be many limitations depending on where you live, what you earn and whether your capacity is restricted, for example, by chronic health conditions.
And the daily activity combinations researchers looked at in the new study didn’t incorporate things like social interactions, which can improve mental and physical health.
So how many hours a day should we spend socialising? Recent research in Nature found there’s no universal balance between solitude and socialising.
In fact, solitude (when the person chooses it) can reduce stress levels.
This is another reason why Dr Dumuid thinks we’ll never have one single optimum day for overall health.
Instead, perhaps we’ll one day have multiple “best days” with different purposes.
“In the future you might wake up and decide ‘OK, today I want to preference my mental health, let me see what my options are.’
“Then you focus on something else the next day, and then over a week you can balance it out to be a good, healthy week.”
Dr Brakenridge hopes his findings will be used by the federal government to update current health guidelines so they can better reflect the full spectrum of human behaviour.
He says Australia should look to Canada, which has the world’s first 24-hour movement guidelines that lay out how much time adults should spend doing aerobic activities, muscle strengthening, sleeping, sitting and using a screen.
Get the latest health news and information from across the ABC.
Fitness
Business News Today: Stock and Share Market News, Economy and Finance News, Sensex, Nifty, Global Market, NSE, BSE Live IPO News – Moneycontrol.com
While exercise is known to improve memory, scientists have mostly studied this effect by using behavioral tests or brain imaging methods like MRIs, says Michelle Voss, PhD, one of the study’s authors, a professor, and the director of the Health, Brain, and Cognitive Lab at the University of Iowa in Iowa City.
But she says these approaches can’t precisely identify where “ripples” originate, particularly in the deep brain structures like the hippocampus, a part of the brain strongly connected to memory and learning, she says.
The current study, published in Brain Communications, recorded electrical activity directly, using surgically implanted (intracranial) electrodes. “This allowed us to observe how exercise changes the brain’s memory circuits in real time,” Dr. Voss says.
20-Minute Bursts of Exercise Increase Brain Ripples
The participants performed a 5-minute warm-up and then rode a stationary bike for 20 minutes at a pace they could maintain. Researchers recorded their brain activity before and after the biking session.
The electrodes showed an increased rate of so-called sharp-wave ripples from the hippocampus and connections with cortical regions of the brain, which are involved in learning and memory.
“Sharp-wave ripples have long been known from animal studies to play a central role in memory,” Voss says, adding that recent studies using intracranial recordings in humans also support the importance of ripples for human memory.
“Our findings are the first to show that exercise can modulate these ripple signals in the human brain,” she says.
Researchers also observed that larger increases in heart rate during exercise were associated with larger changes in ripple activity in cortical networks, Voss adds.
What’s Already Known About Exercise, Memory, and Learning
Exercise helps build connections between neurons, which deepens and strengthens brain networks, Franssen says.
Physical activity also improves metabolism, which improves insulin sensitivity, helping blood sugar regulation and giving the brain a “more stable and reliable supply of fuel,” Dr. Perlmutter says.
“This is critically important because the brain is an energy-intensive organ, consuming roughly 20 percent of the body’s energy despite representing only a small fraction of body weight,” he adds.
The Research Has Limitations
Voss says researchers were careful to “exclude signals that contained epileptic activity. However, of course, we can’t statistically control for the accumulated effects of having epilepsy on the brain.”
The exercise-brain ripple patterns observed in the current study also closely match those observed in healthy adults using noninvasive brain imaging, such as MRI, she added.
“That convergence across very different methods is one of the strongest indicators that the effects are not specific to epilepsy, but reflect a more general human brain response to exercise,” Voss said.
Researchers also didn’t directly test memory performance, Voss notes. “While hippocampal ripples are strongly linked to memory processing in decades of neuroscience research, the next step will be to measure how exercise-related changes in ripples relate to memory performance in the same individuals.”
Future studies should also compare exercise with other everyday activities, such as sitting quietly or light movement, to determine how specific these effects are to aerobic exercise at the intensity that was studied, she says.
Satisfy Your Brain’s Exercise Craving
It’s never too early or too late to start exercising for brain health, Franssen says.
People of any age, from grade-school children to people in their nineties, can benefit from increased physical activity, Perlmutter says. “My recommendation is to consider taking advantage of the connection between physical activity and brain health across the entire range of human aging.”
Any type of exercise is great, Franssen says, but especially “repetitive behaviors,” like swimming, jogging, and walking.
“Sometimes we let the hugeness of putting in a huge fitness routine get in our way,” she says. “Having a little exercise snack every so often is also very important to improving cognition.”
Increasing our level of physical fitness leads to a bigger release of brain-boosting proteins following one session of exercise, a new study led by a UCL researcher has found.
The study, published in Brain Research, took a group of inactive unfit participants through a 12-week training programme of cycling three times per week and made them fitter. Researchers found as their fitness increased, so did the amount of brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF) released following exercise, resulting in improved brain function.
Just 15 minutes of moderate to vigorous aerobic exercise releases BDNF, a brain protein which is known to support the formation of new neurons and new synapses (connections between brain cells), and maintains the health of existing neurons. This is the first study to show that for unfit people, just 12 weeks of consistent training can boost the brain’s response to a single 15-minute workout.
The study, led by Dr Flaminia Ronca (UCL Surgery & Interventional Science, and the Institute of Sport, Exercise and Health), involved 30 participants – 23 male and seven female – taking part in the 12-week programme. To assess fitness levels throughout the programme, participants completed VO2max tests every six weeks, which measures the maximum rate of oxygen your body can consume and use during intense exercise.
BDNF levels were measured pre- and post-VO2max testing, alongside a series of cognitive and memory tests, while also measuring changes in brain activity in the prefrontal cortex – where executive functions such as decision-making, emotion regulation, attention and impulsivity are controlled.
By the final week of the trial, results showed that baseline levels of BDNF did not change, but participants did show a larger spike of BDNF following intense exercise, compared to how their brains responded to intense exercise before the 12-week programme. This was linked to improvements in VO2max (aerobic fitness).
Higher overall BDNF levels and stronger exercise-induced increases were also associated with changes in activity across key areas of the prefrontal cortex during attention and inhibition tasks, though not during memory tasks.
Overall, the results showed that increasing physical fitness can enhance the brain’s ability to produce BDNF in response to acute bouts of exercise, which can have a strong positive influence on neural activity.
Lead author Dr Flaminia Ronca said: “We’ve known for a while that exercise is good for our brain, but the mechanisms through which this occurs are still being disentangled. The most exciting finding from our study is that if we become fitter, our brains benefit even more from a single session of exercise, and this can change in only six weeks.”
Notes to editors:
For more information or to speak to the researchers involved, please contact: Tom Cramp, UCL Media Relations , T: +447586 711698, E: [email protected]
The research paper: ‘BDNF relates to prefrontal cortex activity in the context of physical exercise’, Flaminia Ronca, Cian Xu, Ellen Kong, Dennis Chan, Antonia Hamilton, Giampietro Schiavo, Ilias Tachtsidis, Paola Pinti, Benjamin Tari, Tom Gurney, Paul W. Burgess, is published in Brain Research, March 2026,
About UCL (University College London)
UCL is a diverse global community of world-class academics, students, industry links, external partners, and alumni. Our powerful collective of individuals and institutions work together to explore new possibilities.
Since 1826, we have championed independent thought by attracting and nurturing the world’s best minds. Our community of more than 50,000 students from 150 countries and over 16,000 staff pursues academic excellence, breaks boundaries and makes a positive impact on real world problems.
We are consistently ranked among the top 10 universities in the world and are one of only a handful of institutions rated as having the strongest academic reputation and the broadest research impact.
We have a progressive and integrated approach to our teaching and research – championing innovation, creativity and cross-disciplinary working. We teach our students how to think, not what to think, and see them as partners, collaborators and contributors.
For 200 years, we are proud to have opened higher education to students from a wide range of backgrounds and to change the way we create and share knowledge.
We were the first in England to welcome women to university education and that courageous attitude and disruptive spirit is still alive today. We are UCL.
www.ucl.ac.uk | Read news at www.ucl.ac.uk/news/ | Follow UCL News on Bluesky and LinkedIn
Journal
Brain Research
DOI
10.1016/j.brainres.2026.150253
Method of Research
Experimental study
Subject of Research
People
Article Title
BDNF relates to prefrontal cortex activity in the context of physical exercise
Article Publication Date
4-Mar-2026
Media Contact
Tom Cramp
University College London
[email protected]
Journal
Brain Research
DOI
10.1016/j.brainres.2026.150253
Journal
Brain Research
DOI
10.1016/j.brainres.2026.150253
Method of Research
Experimental study
Subject of Research
People
Article Title
BDNF relates to prefrontal cortex activity in the context of physical exercise
Article Publication Date
4-Mar-2026
Tags
/Health and medicine/Human health/Physical exercise
bu içeriği en az 2000 kelime olacak şekilde ve alt başlıklar ve madde içermiyecek şekilde ünlü bir science magazine için İngilizce olarak yeniden yaz. Teknik açıklamalar içersin ve viral olacak şekilde İngilizce yaz. Haber dışında başka bir şey içermesin. Haber içerisinde en az 12 paragraf ve her bir paragrafta da en az 50 kelime olsun. Cevapta sadece haber olsun. Ayrıca haberi yazdıktan sonra içerikten yararlanarak aşağıdaki başlıkların bilgisi var ise haberin altında doldur. Eğer yoksa bilgisi ilgili kısmı yazma.:
Subject of Research:
Article Title:
News Publication Date:
Web References:
References:
Image Credits:
Keywords
Tags: 12-week cycling training program benefitsbrain plasticity and physical fitnessbrain-derived neurotrophic factor after exerciseeffects of aerobic exercise on BDNFexercise and neuron healthexercise-induced neurogenesisfitness level impact on brain proteinsfitness training for cognitive improvementimproving brain function through fitnessmoderate to vigorous aerobic exercise effectsphysical fitness and brain healthVO2max and brain function correlation
New synthetic opioid ‘cychlorphine’ linked to 16 overdose deaths across East Tennessee
Texas man facing execution for fatally stabbing girlfriend and her 8-year-old son
‘It’s really cool’: Utah selected to lead federal pilot program testing electric aircraft
VT Lottery Mega Millions, Gimme 5 results for March 10, 2026
The Good, the Bad and the Ugly from Virginia Tech’s 95-89 Loss to Wake Forest
Florida High School Football Rankings: Top 25 teams – Oct. 21
Cleary's 21 help Le Moyne down Central Connecticut State 69-64 in OT
How old is Bo Nix? What to know about Oregon quarterback ahead of 2024 NFL Draft
99th annual Pony Swim held in Virginia
Indiana Members Credit Union announced as new anchor tenant at Bottleworks District
EXCLUSIVE: ICE says El Paso detention facility will stay open under new contractor after $1.2B deal scrapped
Von der Leyen ‘acting outside of competence,’ Araud tells Euronews
Wheelchair curler Steve Emt’s path from drunk driver to three-time Paralympian
Map: 2.3-Magnitude Earthquake Reported North of New York City
Trump stirs GOP primary drama with visit to Massie’s Kentucky home turf
-
Wisconsin1 week agoSetting sail on iceboats across a frozen lake in Wisconsin
-
Massachusetts1 week agoMassachusetts man awaits word from family in Iran after attacks
-
Pennsylvania6 days agoPa. man found guilty of raping teen girl who he took to Mexico
-
Florida1 week agoFlorida man rescued after being stuck in shoulder-deep mud for days
-
Detroit, MI5 days agoU.S. Postal Service could run out of money within a year
-
Miami, FL6 days agoCity of Miami celebrates reopening of Flagler Street as part of beautification project
-
Sports6 days agoKeith Olbermann under fire for calling Lou Holtz a ‘scumbag’ after legendary coach’s death
-
Virginia7 days agoGiants will hold 2026 training camp in West Virginia