Member-only story
Why You Should ‘Exercise Snack’ Throughout the Day
Small bouts of exercise — like climbing stairs — could improve fitness
If you’re like most Americans, you’ve been avoiding the gym. And it’s probably not necessarily because you hate exercising. Getting a workout can involve traveling to a fitness location, changing clothes, using equipment, navigating other exercisers, and then, of course, 30 to 60 minutes of physical endurance.
But what if taking the stairs a few times a day could “count” as exercise?
Canadian scientists who helped popularize high intensity interval training (HIIT) and the “one-minute workout” have released new research that supports a new way to improve physical fitness: “exercise snacks.”
No, it’s not a protein-based energy gel. It’s what researchers at McMaster University in Ontario, Canada call short spurts of exercise interspersed throughout the day. Their recent study, published in the journal Applied Physiology, Nutrition, and Metabolism, found that short bouts of physical movement — like briskly climbing stairs a few times a day — can effectively improve a person’s fitness level.
In other recent studies, exercise snacking has shown to be effective in reducing blood sugar and in lowering blood pressure — more effective, even, than one bout of 30-minute, daily exercise.
The McMaster scientists assigned a group of healthy, sedentary adults to “vigorously” climb up three flights of stairs three times a day, with a one to four hour rest in between, for six weeks. Their fitness levels were tested against a control group of sedentary non-exercisers.
In terms of cardiorespiratory fitness — how efficiently your heart and lungs move oxygen to your skeletal muscles during exercise — the results were modest: an improvement of 5 percent. Exercise snacking doesn’t create as much metabolic stress as, say, boot camp. And it’s metabolic stress that moves the needle for cardiorespiratory health.
But the exercise snackers’ power output (or how much energy they generate) improved by 12 percent, their exercise tolerance improved, and their functional performance improved as well. While more research is needed, the results sound good to Michele Olson, PhD…
