If you’re like me you likely recall (with some disdain) the typical strategies to stay fit such as ‘why don’t you park at the far edge of the parking lot?’, or ‘why not take the stairs instead of the elevator?’.

If you’re like me, you are of the optimization mindset. When it comes to exercise, to garner any sort of benefit you like to work hard and feel like multiple 10 minute sessions of extra walking here and there must be useless.

Well sadly, if you’re like me, you’ve been proven wrong by research…..yet again.

An article came out this month in the journal sports medicine that compared small “exercise snacks” of 10 minute bouts throughout the day to continuous “exercise meals” of the same duration, but done continuously.

You see roughly ¼ (23.3%) of adults fail to meet the current recommendations for physical activity as set out by the World Health Organization. The number excuse folks give is a lack of time to exercise.

Since 1995, the US Physical Activity Guidelines have strategized to combat this excuse by recommending that physical activity can be accumulated in shorter bouts throughout the day to reach the total recommended amount. This saw the birth of the strategies at the top of this article. Strangely, this recommendation had never really been studied.

In the past few years, a few research trials have come out comparing the benefits of continuous cardiovascular exercise, to bouts of 10 minutes that showed comparable benefits between the two groups. This is great, because most physical activity that you garner throughout a day (even if you do workout) is through the accumulation of less structured periods like taking the stairs instead of the elevator.

The way research works is that once there are enough similar small individual trials completed on a topic, somebody pools the data from the groups together in something called a meta-analysis to draw more definitive conclusions. It’s like a consensus of the findings from a bunch of studies.

That’s what this paper is.

Specifically, this meta-analysis looked at 19 individual trials that had a total of 1080 participants. In the studies, there were comparisons between groups doing 10 minute bouts of exercise interspersed throughout the day versus those doing the same amount of time in one session. As an example; in one study Group A did one session of 30 minutes continuous exercise while Group B did 3 bouts of 10 minutes of the same exercise at the same intensity interspersed throughout the day. To keep it simple, most trials employed walking as the exercise intervention. The average intensity was a moderate heart rate (60-80% of their predictive max).

Here were the key findings:

• The groups had NO DIFFERENCES in health outcomes from baseline scores to end of study score! This included measures for :
  1. cardiorespiratory fitness improvements (VO2max)
  2. cardiovascular risk factors (blood pressure and most blood lipid profiles)
  3. secondary outcomes such as quality of life score improvements, self esteem etc
  4. Other measures of aesthetics including lean mass and waist to hip ratios
• In fact for body mass loss (weight loss) – there was a small but statistically significant difference in favor of those that did the 10 minute bouts of exercise when compared to the continuous groups.
• There was also a small but significant difference favoring the 10 minute bouts group for lessening LDL cholesterol.

Essentially, by sustaining accumulated short bouts of exercise, not only are you getting the same positive effects of doing a continuous bout of the same total duration and intensity, you are actually more likely to lose weight AND improve your cholesterol.

Why?

The authors suggest the acute increase in metabolic rate by exercise both during and then after ends up resulting in greater total energy expenditure by doing shorter bouts of exercise when compared to just a single bout. This over time leads to a larger total energy deficit and therefore a greater reduction in body mass. The cholesterol changes are likely linked to the greater loss of body weight.

One caveat. In the studies the overall drop out rate for the short bouts was higher then the continuous groups, albeit a small difference of 20% compared to 16%. It seems some people have more difficulty completing the recurrent bouts throughout the day. That said, since walking was the primary thing studied why not ask one of our skilled practitioners to write your boss asking for a walking desk? We can even attach a copy of this study!