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.”
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.