How do exercise snacks work, and how do you do them?
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An exercise snack is a minute or two of hard effort dropped into a normal day: two flights of stairs taken fast, a hill on the walk home, a quick set of squats before a meeting. Do a few a day. In 25,241 adults who never exercised, about 4.4 minutes a day of bursts like these went with 26% to 30% lower risk of death.
Two ideas get in the way of snacks. The first is that exercise only counts in a proper session, at least half an hour, in workout clothes, so a minute on the stairs feels like a rounding error. The second goes the other way and treats snacks as a clever trick that replaces exercise, so you can skip the rest. The studies land in between, since hard minutes in daily life count for a lot more than people expect, and they still work best as part of a week that has the walks and the strength in it too.
What we’d do
Pick two or three moments in your day that happen anyway, like the stairs at work, the walk to the train and the time the kettle takes to boil. Turn each into a snack: climb fast, walk the last stretch at a near-run, or do squats until the kettle clicks. Go hard enough that you can only say a few words. Aim for three a day, and keep your walks and two strength days on top.
If you remember three things
- Three short bursts a day went with 38% to 40% lower risk of death in people who didn’t exercise.
- Stair snacks raised fitness in a trial. Three fast climbs a day, three days a week, for 6 weeks.
- Hard minutes count double. Each one counts as two brisk minutes toward the 150.
What makes it a snack?
It has to be hard. By CDC’s talk test, vigorous effort means you can’t say more than a few words without stopping for a breath. That’s the bar. A stroll to the coffee machine is good for you, but it isn’t a snack. A climb that leaves you breathing hard at the top is.
- Stairs, slow pace Brisk
- Very brisk walk, 4.0 to 4.4 mph Brisk
- Carrying 1 to 15 lb upstairs Brisk
- Squats and lunges, high intensity Hard
- Stairs, general Hard
- Brisk walk up a 6 to 10% hill Hard
- Stairs, fast, one step at a time Hard
METs, the energy of each against sitting still, from the 2024 Compendium of Physical Activities. CDC counts 6 or more as vigorous, the zone a snack wants to reach.
Stairs are the best snack most people have. Taken at a slow pace they’re only moderate, and taken fast, one step at a time, they’re one of the hardest things in the whole list. The difference is the pace, so the same staircase can be a snack or a stroll.
The menu
- Stairs, fast. Two or three flights, one step at a time, holding the rail if you like.
- The last stretch at a near-run. The final block to the bus stop or the train.
- A hill. Put one into your daily walk and take it hard.
- Squats until it burns. Thirty seconds to a minute, fast, while something boils or loads.
- The heavy bags upstairs. Carry the groceries up in one trip instead of three.
- A stair burst on a timer. Today’s session has a 60-second stair burst with a counter that shows how many you’ve done today.
What did the studies find?
In 2022, Stamatakis and his team looked at 25,241 people in the UK Biobank, average age about 62, who said they didn’t exercise at all. Each one wore a wrist device for a week, and the researchers picked out the short bursts of hard effort hidden in their days, like a fast climb or a hurried walk. Then they followed everyone for about 6.9 years.
People who had about 4.4 minutes a day of these bursts had 26% to 30% lower risk of death from any cause and 32% to 34% lower risk of dying from heart disease than people with none. Three bursts a day, of 1 or 2 minutes each, went with 38% to 40% lower risk of death and 48% to 49% lower heart deaths. In 62,344 people who did exercise, hard minutes showed the same pattern. People chose their own days, so this shows a link in a group and can’t promise anything to one person.
A trial tested the stairs directly. Sedentary young adults climbed a 3-flight stairwell of 60 steps as fast as they could, 3 times a day with 1 to 4 hours between climbs, 3 days a week for 6 weeks. Their peak oxygen uptake, the fitness number, rose against a group that didn’t climb. The researchers called the gain modest, and there were only 24 people, but nobody needed a gym, a change of clothes or more than a staircase.
Do snacks count toward the 150?
Yes. The US guideline dropped its old rule that activity only counted in 10-minute stretches, and a hard minute counts as two brisk ones. That makes 15 hard minutes over a week count as 30 of your 150. Three one-minute stair bursts on each workday gets you there.
That’s a real share, and it leaves most of the week for brisk walking and two strength sessions. Your week counts hard minutes for you.
A picture from daily life
Think of how a kitchen stays clean. Some people leave everything for one big scrub on Saturday. Others wipe the counter while the pasta cooks and rinse the pan while the coffee drips. By the end of the week the second kitchen is cleaner, and nobody spent an afternoon on it.
Snacks are the wipe-while-it-cooks version of exercise. Each one is small, and they keep happening because they ride on things you were doing anyway.
Who should take it easy?
Hard bursts are hard by design. If you haven’t exercised in years, start with stairs at a steady pace for a week or two before you speed up, and build to fast climbs. Today’s session asks a few safety questions before it offers a stair burst, and who should check with a doctor first explains them. That page is still a draft waiting on a clinician’s read.
Stop and rest if you feel chest pain, dizziness, an irregular heartbeat, nausea or you can't catch your breath. Chest pain or pressure, or pain in your arm, jaw or back, means call 911.
Can snacks replace workouts?
Yes, for some people
The bursts did a lot on their own. In people who never exercised, a few minutes a day went with much lower risk, and the researchers wrote that it may suit people who can’t or won’t exercise. For someone who will never join a gym, snacks are a real plan.
Mostly they add to it
They don’t cover the whole guideline. The stair trial’s fitness gain was modest, and snacks don’t do the strength half, which needs every major muscle worked on two days. Use them on top of your walks and two strength sessions, and on the days a workout won’t happen.
The short answer to the same question is in what are exercise snacks, and do they work?, and a workout has to be at least 30 minutes to count takes on the old rule.
7 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 Department of Health and Human Services, Physical Activity Guidelines for Americans, 2nd edition, executive summary, 2018odphp.health.gov
- Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Measuring physical activity intensitycdc.gov
- Herrmann SD and others, 2024 Adult Compendium of Physical Activities: a third update of the energy costs of human activities, Journal of Sport and Health Science, 2024europepmc.org
- Compendium of Physical Activities, walking and conditioning exercise codespacompendium.com
- MedlinePlus, Being active when you have heart disease, US National Library of Medicinemedlineplus.gov
