As a working mother-of-two my life is a never-ending juggle of being at my desk and parenting, which means that my fitness regime (or lack of it) is the least priority. The demands of school runs, after-school clubs, homework, and everything else on top means that the days of me being able to dedicate an hour to a gym or fitness class are a thing of the past. These days, I’m lucky if I manage to fit in one 5k run a week; two at the very best. The short days, however, make this logistically harder, because I don’t feel safe running in the dark. So when I read that a new study found that squeezing in a few ultra-short micro-workouts may be just as good if not better than sustained exercise, I was intrigued.

Exercise in shorter bursts

The study, which was carried out by Dr Francesco Luciano of The University of Milan and published by the Royal Society, compared long continuous walks to short intermittent ones and discovered that basically, more energy was being used on the shorter bursts. Delving further, I discovered another study published in January 2022 in the journal Exercise and Sport Sciences Review, which found that performing short bouts (one minute or less) of vigorous exercise – which the researchers referred to as “exercise snacks” – at intervals throughout the day was a “feasible, well-tolerated, and time-efficient approach” to improving heart and lung health and reducing the impact of a sedentary lifestyle on cardiometabolic health. All of this sounded appealing. At 44, I appreciate the importance of exercise for both my mental and physical health. So I decided to swap my weekly, (or occasionally twice weekly) 5k run for daily “exercise snacking”. But first I needed to find out exactly what it entailed. (Photo: Olga Rolenko/Getty)

What does 'exercise snacking' involve?

“Exercise snacking is fundamentally a phrase that describes minimal doses of exercise done frequently,” explains Dr Oly Perkin, a lecturer and researcher in health and exercise science, who specialises in muscle and minimal dose exercise at the University of Bath. “It’s really just a way of describing a time format rather than specific exercises.” However, he adds, there is a key distinction between exercise snacking and activities you do anyway. “Physical movement is any movement that you do; exercise is a type of physical activity to improve your health and a specific part of your health. So it’s not just like ‘I’m walking for the bus so I’m going to pick up the pace’, it’s ‘I’m going to do this to improve my strength, or my glycaemic control, or whatever the thing is’. So it’s quite targeted and is a thing that is done on purpose. The snacking concept is the way that you drop it into your day and your life,” Dr Perkin says.(Photo: Owen Humphreys/PA)

Different exercises for different people

And as for the minimum time period that ‘exercise snacking’ should be done for, “it’s all very relative and will depend on the objective,” says Dr Perkin. “If your objective is to improve your V02 max [the measure of how much oxygen your body can use during exercise] to be a good runner, an exercise snack of one minute won’t do anything for you. It’s not going to be enough of a stimulus, it’s not going to be challenging the right physiological systems to make those improvements. If you’re in your 80s and broadly sedentary and rarely get up from a chair and use a zimmer frame to get around the house, doing 30 seconds of sit-to-stands from a chair will probably see some quite big benefits in strength and circulation, balance and muscle mass.” Bath University’s website provides me with some suggested exercises, including “sit-to-stand”, standing knee bends, marching on the spot, seated leg kicks and standing calf raises. Other sources online suggest that running up and down the stairs for a minute is good to get the heart rate up. (Photo: Silke Woweries/Getty/The Image Bank RF)

Trying it out for myself

So while my children got ready for school one morning I began my foray into exercise snacking by running up and down the stairs for a minute. By the end I was gasping for breath and my heart was definitely pumping. Then I did the exercises above for a minute each, adding in a couple of others too, including half press-ups. My total exercise time was less than 10 minutes in total, as I needed to get going on the school run, but I felt more energised than I did on a typical morning. That evening, after putting dinner on, I repeated the same bout of exercise snacking. It didn’t feel like an unmanageable task, and it also stopped me snacking on biscuits and scrolling on my phone – my usual activity at that time.

'Snacking' fitting well into daily life

In the days that followed I carried on squeezing in short bouts of exercises when I could. I added in hand-weights to make it more challenging, and “snacked” for a minimum of seven minutes each morning and evening. The biggest bonus was the way in which exercise snacking fitted into my lifestyle. I could also do it anywhere – one evening I adapted the exercises to do while watching my son’s football training. As the days went on I found that I wasn’t getting as out of breath as I ran up and down the stairs, and I could do more reps of each exercise in a minute. And although I hadn’t been looking to lose weight (at 5ft 4 and 60kg, I was in the healthy BMI category), I did notice that my upper arms, thighs and buttocks felt firmer after two weeks. I wondered how it compared to my usual 5k runs though? (Photo: SolStock/Getty/E+)

Better or worse than a 5k?

“The less physical function you have, the more likely you are to benefit from this minimal dose approach,” says Dr Perkins. “It’s potentially a good gateway drug to get you into something. So if you’re looking at the Couch to 5k and think you couldn’t do day 1, then maybe exercise snacking would be the thing you do for a month before to improve strength. All the psychological elements of learning discipline, sticking to it and feeling better, are probably really where the benefit lies.” But, he adds, “it’s really important to say that exercise snacking would be dramatically inferior to you doing two 5k runs a week. It’s not the same stimulus, and [exercise snacking] is not designed for people who can go for two 5k runs a week. There’s an overwhelming majority of evidence suggesting that your 5k run will be better and do more for you and improve your strength more than an exercise snack – which is inferior to most traditional types of exercise – will.” For me, one of the biggest benefits of exercise snacking was being able to fit it into my busy life on a daily basis, as an added bonus to my weekly run. It improved my mood, meant that my body felt more toned, and that I snacked (on biscuits) and scrolled less. I won’t stop running entirely, but I’ll definitely be exercise snacking for the foreseeable. (Photo: Victoria Jones/PA)