What’s An Exercise Snack—And Do They Actually Do Anything?
(Illustration: iStock)
The struggle to exercise consistently is real. It’s not just a scheduling issue for many of us, but a question of sustaining motivation amid the push and pull of daily life. It’s not easy to get yourself pumped up to go to the gym for an hour after a long day of work, and it’s even more challenging if you’re coming back to exercise after taking a break due to injury, illness or just general life stress.
If you can’t face another spin class right now, you might want to lower the bar and try “exercise snacking,” a time-sensitive approach to staying active that incorporates short bursts of vigorous exercise throughout your day—even at work.
What’s an exercise snack?
An exercise snack is a “bout of vigorous exercise lasting a minute or less,” explains Martin Gibala, a professor of kinesiology at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ont. who studies the benefits of time-efficient exercise and who co-authored the book The One-Minute Workout: Science Shows a Way to Get Fit That’s Smarter, Faster, Shorter.
Almost any body-weight movement or cardio burst can qualify as a “snack.” It can be as simple as performing a minute of squats or jumping jacks. Ideally, you build up to doing four one-minute heart-rate boosting snacks over the course of a day.
How to snack wisely
It doesn’t really matter what activity you choose; instead, what matters is the intensity level. The exercise needs to get your heart rate up and prompt some heavy breathing, says Gibala.
That doesn’t mean you have to start sprinting down the hall at the office; instead, climb a set of stairs for 45 seconds to a minute. Whatever movement you do, Gibala says, it should feel like you’re pushing yourself to reach a seven out of 10 on the exercise intensity scale.
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What’s the benefit of taking a “snack” break?
Don’t scoff at the benefits of four minutes of “snacking.” While it isn’t a replacement for meeting the recommended guidelines for daily physical activity that supports long-term health—Health Canada recommends that adults get at least 150 minutes of moderate-to-vigorous physical activity each week and to limit sedentary time to eight hours or less per day—there’s some research to suggest that these bite-size portions of physical activity may help move the needle when it comes to improving some markers of overall health.
Gibala’s recent study on the potential benefits of exercise snacking as a health intervention among people who have type-2 diabetes found that participants who engaged in a 12-week exercise snack trial in which they “snacked” for one minute four times a day, five days a week, experienced small but significant improvements in blood sugar and blood pressure.
Snack your way to better overall health
For people who already engage in regular bouts of longer, structured exercise like strength training or jogging on the treadmill, exercise snacking can be a good way to increase your overall physical activity throughout the day, says Jay Arzadon, a trainer and founder of Arzadon Fitness in Toronto.
If you’re suddenly finding your fitness results have plateaued, Arzadon says it’s a good idea to look at how much overall daily movement you’re getting.
“We’ve had clients recognize that though they may be exercising for an hour regularly, they’re only getting in 2,000 steps a day,” says Arzadon.
Upping your overall daily movement should be a “pillar” of your health and fitness goals, he says. It’s why Arzadon encourages his clients to aim for at least 6,000 steps a day outside of their efforts at the gym.
“Movement is medicine; it increases blood flow and helps positively impact your metabolism,” he says.
‘Snack’ to avoid sitting so much
Snacking can also be a smart way to break up prolonged periods of sitting, which is an independent risk factor for all-cause mortality. (According to the Canadian Cancer Society, the average Canadian spends 60 percent of their waking hours engaged in sedentary behaviour.)
A small study done by researchers at UBC Okanagan concluded that fitness snacks—in this case, incorporating three daily bouts of stair climbing at work—not only effectively broke up sedentary time, but also had a positive influence on participants' overall activity levels.
Gibala, who is currently engaged in a study looking at the impact of snacking on people struggling with obesity, agrees that the snack approach can be a good way to squeeze more activity into your day.
“We know that for a lot of people, meeting the recommended daily exercise guidelines is very daunting,” he says. Snacking represents a “low barrier to entry,” to moving more regularly, he says. And once you start snacking consistently, you may want to exercise more often.
“Hopefully people start feeling a little better about themselves or maybe when they're walking around, playing with their kids, they go, ‘Hey, I'm not as tired.’ And that starts them on the way,” says Gibala.
Ultimately, however, whether you’re meeting the recommended guidelines for physical activity or not, most of us are likely better served by setting a timer and “snacking” our way through the day rather than sitting for prolonged periods.
Even professors of exercise physiology like Gibala must remind themselves to get up and move for their health.
“I spend a ton of time sitting at my desk and it’s something I think about when my Oura ring tells me I’ve been sitting for an hour and need to get up,” Gibala says. “Even if you meet the daily recommended guidelines, you still need to break up sedentary behaviour.”
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Flannery Dean is a writer based in Hamilton, Ont. She’s written for The Narwhal, the Globe and Mail and The Guardian.
