Feeding patients the idea of exercise snacks

Doctors often urge their patients to get more exercise to improve, well, just about everything—heart disease risk, knee pain, recovery from surgery, weight control—but there’s often little appetite to make a change and become active.Solution? Exercise snacks.These snacks do not involve scarfing chips or granola bars. They’re short, intense bursts of exercise you can do on the fly. “It’s a way to either introduce or embed some vigorous exercise into someone’s day,” says Jonathan Little, professor in the Centre for Chronic Disease Prevention and Management in the Faculty of Health and Social Development at the University of British Columbia.Think of them as high intensity interval training (HIIT) workouts—which are often 30-or-so-minute exercise sessions that include many rounds of aerobic and strength training where participants get their heart rates as high as 90% of the maximum—but just broken up throughout the day.Stork’s study called “Exercise in the workplace: examining the receptivity of practical and time-efficient stair-climbing “exercise snacks”” published in the journal Applied Physiology, Nutrition, and Metabolism, looks at what happened when office workers did stair-climbing snacks on the job.This proof-of-concept study assessed if 14 people liked getting up from their desks to climb 53–60 stairs (about four-to-five flights) at three separate times a day, with each bout taking less than a minute. Or, if they preferred short HIIT workouts of three rounds of the same workout, but all at once, taking up around five minutes. The study also looked at which exercise approach better influenced overall sedentary behaviours.Office workers at UBC’s Okanagan campus completed the trial, doing both snacks and HIIT, and then participants did a self-directed week of either or both approaches.Study results showed that people enjoyed both types of exercise, felt a little bit more confident in their ability to do the snacks and fit them into their day. And 71% preferred snacks after the main, supervised part of the trial.“On average, more people enjoyed the snacks and they could see themselves engaging in them,” says Little. As well, when people were doing either snacks or HIIT during the unsupervised week, they were a little bit more active on exercise days. “It was a bit nuanced and not statistically significant. But we showed that if people do exercise snacks, they don’t compensate for that by being more sedentary for the rest of the day because they’re tired.”The term exercise snack is only a few years old and Little says there have been only been about 20 or so studies on them so far. “It’s very early days,” he says.Importantly, Little notes, these snacks are not about standing up from your desk and doing a gentle squat or two—they need to be intense to get some of the proven benefits of an HIIT-like exercise. (Research shows that HIIT offers similar benefits to moderate, longer sessions of exercise.)“If you want to do a really short bout of exercise, you’ve got to get huffing and puffing and working at a vigorous intensity to get some of the benefits. There is no free lunch,” says Little.Meanwhile, doctors often suggest people who are not active get started via walking. Little is hoping that exercise snacks become alternative accessible and fun way to get moving. “Going for a hike with your family or going walking your dog is a good form of exercise. We need more research, but the adaptability of exercise snacks is one promising area for people with all sorts of abilities and fitness levels.”He's developing an app to suggest and prompt exercise snack options that go beyond stairs, offering choices that are good for people with, say, knee problems or a small space. He’s hopeful that more research and innovations will help snacks become a popular form of exercise, and one that offers a gateway to getting even more active.“When you’re going for a coffee break and you do a few flights of stairs, that naturally brings more vigorous activity into your day,” says Little. “I don't think it's going to replace all the benefits of longer exercise sessions, but it allows you to get a little so you can feel good about yourself.”

Feeding patients the idea of exercise snacks

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