What are exercise snacks, and do they work?
Short bursts of hard effort tucked into your day, like taking a flight of stairs fast or hurrying for the bus. They seem to work. In 25,241 UK adults who never exercised, about 4 minutes a day of these bursts went with 26% to 30% lower risk of death.
For most people, exercise means changing clothes, driving somewhere and an hour gone. Anything less feels like it shouldn’t count, so a fast climb up the office stairs doesn’t register as exercise at all. Researchers only started measuring these bursts once people wore trackers on their wrists all day, and the bursts turned out to go with a surprisingly large drop in risk.
What we’d do
Take the stairs fast whenever you meet them, up to three times a day. Walk the last few minutes to anywhere at a pace that makes talking hard. Use snacks on top of your walks and lifting, or as your way in if you’re starting from nothing. Hold the rail, and stop if you get chest pain or feel dizzy.
Exercise snacks work like a jar you drop spare change into. Each coin is tiny and you barely notice it leave your pocket, and after a month the jar is heavy.
The study that named them
In 2022, Emmanuel Stamatakis and colleagues looked at 25,241 people in the UK Biobank who said they never exercised, average age about 62. Each had worn a wrist tracker for a week, and the researchers looked for bursts of hard effort in daily life, like stairs, carrying shopping or a fast walk. They called it vigorous intermittent lifestyle physical activity, VILPA for short. Then they followed everyone for about 7 years.
4.4 mina day, the median
Went with 26% to 30% lower risk of death from any cause and from cancer, and 32% to 34% lower from heart disease.
3 burstsa day, 1 or 2 minutes each
Went with 38% to 40% lower risk of death from any cause and from cancer.
0workouts
Everyone in the study was a non-exerciser. The bursts were all from daily life.
It’s a study of what people did, so the people who climbed stairs fast may have been healthier to begin with. The same pattern showed up for hard minutes in 62,344 people in the study who did exercise.
Did anyone test it in a trial?
Yes, on a small scale. In a 2019 trial, inactive young adults climbed a 60-step, three-flight stairwell as fast as they could, three times a day with 1 to 4 hours between, three days a week. After 6 weeks their fitness was higher than a group who didn’t climb, with 12 people in each group. The researchers called the gain modest, which is what you’d expect from three minutes a day.
Do they count toward the 150?
They count. The 2018 US guideline dropped its old rule that activity only counted in 10-minute stretches. A burst hard enough that you can’t say more than a few words is vigorous, and each vigorous minute counts as two. The stair burst in Today’s session adds one hard minute to your week ring each time, and counts how many you’ve done today.
4 sources
- Stamatakis E and others, Association of wearable device-measured vigorous intermittent lifestyle physical activity with mortality, Nature Medicine, 2022europepmc.org
- Jenkins EM and others, Do stair climbing exercise snacks improve cardiorespiratory fitness?, Applied Physiology, Nutrition, and Metabolism, 2019europepmc.org
- US Office of Disease Prevention and Health Promotion, Top 10 things to know about the second edition of the Physical Activity Guidelines for Americansodphp.health.gov
- Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Measuring physical activity intensitycdc.gov
