Exercise snacks
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Wearable devices can capture unexplored movement patterns such as brief bursts of vigorous intermittent lifestyle physical activity (VILPA) that are part into everyday life, rather than being done as exercise. I am using the term 'exercise snacks' to refer to VILPA to make this post more readable.
The study below compared all-cause, cardiovascular disease (CVD) and cancer mortality in 25,241 non-exercisers (mean age 61.8 years, 14,178 women/11,063 men) in the UK Biobank. Over an average follow-up of 6.9 years exercise snacks were inversely associated with all three of these outcomes in a near-linear fashion.
Social influencers have suggested that getting exercise snacks every hour of your waking day will provide the best results. However, the data this article shows that the law of Diminishing returns applies to exercise snacks. The dose response fade quickly and a large chunk of the benefit cam be captured with about 3-5 snacks. Daily consistency may be more important than increasing the number of daily snacks. This is one of 12 graphs in the article.
Compared with participants who engaged in no VILPA, participants who engaged in VILPA at the sample median VILPA frequency of 3 length-standardized bouts per day (lasting 1 or 2 min each) showed a 38%–40% reduction in all-cause and cancer mortality risk and a 48%–49% reduction in CVD mortality risk. Moreover, the sample median VILPA duration of 4.4 min per day was associated with a 26%–30% reduction in all-cause and cancer mortality risk and a 32%–34% reduction in CVD mortality risk. We obtained similar results when repeating the above analyses for vigorous physical activity (VPA) in 62,344 UK Biobank participants who exercised (1,552 deaths, 35,290 women/27,054 men). These results indicate that small amounts of vigorous nonexercise physical activity are associated with substantially lower mortality. VILPA in nonexercisers appears to elicit similar effects to VPA in exercisers, suggesting that VILPA may be a suitable physical activity target, especially in people not able or willing to exercise.
Check with your medical professionals to determine if exercise snacks are right for you.
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@DavidPS what constitutes the exercise ? swinging ur arms around and doing a jig?
