Strength By Fitness
Post Meal & Hourly 5 Minute Movement Activities Make for an Easy Daily Client Habit With Measurable Benefits. Welcome to another fact-based Strength By Fitness article
A new study published in the British Journal of Sports Medicine has, unsurprisingly, concluded that taking regular five-minute movement snacks every hour or so is a clearly measurable way to boost employees' wellbeing, mood, and daily energy without losing work-related productivity and efficiency.
On top of that, we already know that we can add many small, but measurable health benefits to that short, but meaningful list of fact-based improvements. Such as cardiovascular health, greater muscle mass activation, clearly improved metabolic health, and leaner body mass, et cetera.
The 5-minute Activity
Movement snacks: A healthy strategy to mitigate the harms of sedentary work & lifestyles
A 5-minute movement snack is, of course, not going to offer substantial benefits. But it is well-established across many studies and real-life client examples that it boosts daily energy, health, body composition, and fitness outcomes compared to not doing these regular movement breaks.
Scheduled Habits
So much so that a simple 5-minute post-meal activity is one of our go-to daily habits that we teach all clients, a tiny little lifestyle adjustment with clear, measurable benefits. And the hourly 5-minute habit put on display in this workplace-based study mirrors those benefits perfectly well.
The Study
The study by Columbia University evaluated 11,484 Participants whom took 5-minute walking breaks at a self-selected frequency.
1 x 5 minute walk
Group 1 did this walk once every 30 minutes.
Group 2 did it once per hour.
Group 3, one 5-minute walk every 120 min.
Three groups
Most of the employees in this study worked regular 8 to 9-hour workdays and usually spent most of their time sedentary. For the first week of the study, they went about their usual routine and completed a daily survey that tracked their tiredness, mood, and work performance.
For weeks two and three, they were tasked to take a 5-minute walk at work every half hour, hour, or every two hours.
The Outcome of The Study
5 minute every 30 minutes
A 5-minute walk every half hour was the most beneficial for mood and reducing tiredness, but was considered disruptive to their day job by the employees themselves.
Why this matters, & what the study is not saying.
Small daily movement activities like this, be it every hour, or after every meal, and snack, matter greatly, because the adult population in developed countries nowadays spends nearly 75% of their awake time being full-blown sedentary. Many of them whom are also obese with poor metabolic health.
A physical post-meal activity drops blood sugar, increases blood flow, boosts muscle activity, metabolism, and a wide range of health markers. Positive effects that are mirrored by the hourly 5-minute activity break, too. If you then couple this with improved food habits and some weekly exercise, you have a quick and doable foundation for vastly better health, fitness, and body composition outcomes over time.
What this study is not claiming is that one 5-minute break per hour is better than 10 minutes of physical activity per hour. It was simply the activity level these sedentary people found the most agreeable to maintain, all while providing the second-best outcomes.
The Good Enough Habit
One walk every two hours was, of course, far better than no walks, but the hourly five-minute walk displayed the best compromise between improvements in productivity, mood, energy, and alertness. And this represents the fact & experience-based, but also sensible approach that Strength By Fitness keeps with our own clients.
Do something, instead of nothing, and make that your daily foundation. No one needs perfect habits; we just need good enough habits put on repeat to keep our lifelong trajectories going in the right direction.
The good enough then becomes the individual level that fits into your life, your goals, intent, and current capacity. Simply put, the performance floor and ceiling and level of your daily habits are what's individual and progressive.
But the basic big pillars remain the same, because no one needs perfect habits taken to their most extreme, but we all need maintained adherence that´s good enough.
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