Exercise Snacks Deep Dive | Prof. Jonathan Little

Benjamin Hopkins (0:04)

Professor Jonathan Little, I should say, thank you so much for taking the time to speak with me in advance. We appreciate the time.

Jonathan Little (0:10)

Yeah, thanks for having me.

Benjamin Hopkins (0:11)

So we're going to talk about all things exercise snacks today, right? Where the research is, are they beneficial in someone's life? I think a good place to start is, what is an exercise snack and how did you get here to a place where you're studying this?

Jonathan Little (0:25)

Yeah, so this is a great question, and actually I'm sure we'll chat about it in the literature right now, exercise snacks are, the field is growing, evolving, but they've kind of came to mean many different things, even in the scientific literature. But in our view, or I guess in my view where we started here, an exercise snack is a short burst of vigorous exercise that you would do sporadically throughout the day. So that could look like taking the stairs and ascending very quickly. That could look like marching or running on the spot. That could look like doing air squats, doing jumping jacks. But the key idea is that you're pushing yourself, you're going vigorous, but it's short, easy to embed in the day. So it doesn't really feel like a workout. It's not requiring you to change and think about getting equipment and going to the gym. You're just easily embedding it in your day. Where did this come from? I think for us, it was an amalgamation of many different things. I've been studying brief, vigorous or time-efficient exercise for about the last 20 years. I've done stuff on sprint interval training, sit. I've done stuff on high intensity interval training, hit. And those are where you do bursts of exercise at a vigorous intensity, repeated multiple times within a workout. And then we've shown that that's very effective. But that still requires you to have a dedicated block of time, devote that to exercise. So even though we've shown benefits of that, it still is challenging for people to stick to that and adhere to that.

So that was kind of one angle. Brief vigorous exercise has these health benefits. And then at the same time, the other people were showing all of these benefits of breaking up prolonged sitting. So I'm sure your audience is familiar that, you know, sitting too much sedentary time is not good for you, particularly for your metabolic health and your glucose control. So there's all these studies coming out showing that if you just break up your sitting with short bouts of exercise, you can benefit your glucose control. However, we thought, you know, breaking up your sitting is going to be good. But if you just break up your sitting with light activity or standing breaks, that's not going to boost your fitness. So we kind of said, what if you take the concepts from the interval training and the concepts of breaking up your sitting, put them together, and you break up your sitting with a vigorous burst, you can get the benefits of breaking up your sitting and maybe some fitness or other health benefits too. So that's kind of how we, the exercise snacks concepts evolved in our lab and our research.

Benjamin Hopkins (2:48)

Yeah, it's really interesting. I think sometimes the theme that I found doing this podcast is you have an academic of some description, study an extreme and then take all the benefits and thought, okay, well, if we dial this down to where do the effects stop, right? And I guess you start with sort of the hardcore high intensity infiltrating or sit sprint infiltrating. And then you're like, okay, well, all those benefits are amazing. Do they translate if we just do the sort of minimum effective dose? Is that the thinking initially?

Jonathan Little (3:14)

I think so. I mean, maybe not exactly the original thinking, but certainly, you know, lack of time is a perceived barrier to exercise, right? So people say, hey, I don't have enough time to fit exercise in my day. You know, that's probably a perceived barrier or an excuse for a lot of people, you know, that they do have the time, but that's where we kind of started with where the attractiveness of these low volume or sit workouts would be, right? Hey, in only five minutes a day, 10 minutes a day, two minutes a day, whatever the sit protocol might be, you're going to get some benefits. But we kind of knew, I've done some studies looking at real-world adherence to time-efficient hit and sit. And the reality was the adherence isn't any better. It's not any worse, but it isn't any better than the adherence to traditional, you know, moderate intensity continuous exercise. So I don't think those short sit or hit workouts are, they're going to be effective, but they're not kind of moving the needle on the public health scale.