Can exercise snacking help me beat a busy schedule to stay fit?

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Can exercise snacking help me beat a busy schedule to stay fit?
Thanks for asking. This week on Do you really know? We commit to helping you get fit. Tune in for answers to exercise related questions and practical advice on how to stay healthy and in shape. It's well known that we should all be doing half an hour of moderate physical activity every day. But sometimes our busy lifestyles make it difficult finding 30 consecutive minutes to do exercise. Sure, you could get up extra early in the morning, cut your lunch break short, or dig deep to find the necessary energy and motivation for a post-work gym session. But a bite-sized method called exercise snacking may be a simpler option when it comes to hitting your daily quota. Now obviously, we're not talking about sweet or savory snacks here. Rather, separating exercise into smaller chunks which are spread throughout the day. Is that really comparable to doing a full workout in one go? The benefits are undoubted and have been proven by a number of scientific studies. Some have compared groups of exercise snackers to other people who remained inactive for the purposes of the study. Others have looked at how exercise snacking affects performance and other factors like muscle strength or size. Almost always, meaningful gains have been observed. Like research by McMaster University in 2019, which showed that running up 3 flights of stairs 3 times a day for 3 days a week increased aerobic fitness by 5% within 6 weeks. But to answer your question more accurately, yes, the effects of accumulating exercise snacks can be just as positive as with continuous workouts. In 2019, the University of British Columbia found that short bursts of vigorous cycling were just as effective in improving cardio fitness spread out across the day as when they were conducted in a single 10-minute session. Researchers from the Ulster School of Sport reached the same conclusion when analyzing 19 different studies dating from 1970 to 2018, each time looking at fitness and blood pressure levels. Believe it or not, they found that exercise snacking may even offer additional benefits too, like lower cholesterol and more favourable changes in body mass.
How can I adapt my day to fit in exercise snacking? Think about all the available break times you may have during the day, even if they're as short as 5 minutes. Then list the range of exercises you'd like to do, which don't require any complex equipment and can be done anywhere. These may include a short cardio circuit, mobility work or strength focused training for example. You want something that's going to raise your heart rate, but not necessarily leave you sweating buckets if you're going back to your desk afterwards. You can even do exercise snacking without changing into gym gear. You could run up the stairs instead of taking the lift, walk around while on a phone call, or opt for a brisk walk rather than taking the subway. The most important thing is to find your own rhythm and choose exercises which develop all your muscles over the course of a day. Once you work the method into your daily routine, it's much easier to stick to. Don't forget to keep a note of your snacks and check you're hitting the overall goal.
There you have it.
Now you know what exercise snacking is. In under 3 minutes, we answer your questions and help you understand the true meaning behind the trends, concepts and acronyms that are making headlines. Listen along and you will really know it for sure.
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