--- title: The Benefits of "Exercise Snacks" | TIME description: Many of us feel like we’re too busy for exercise. Others actively avoid it. But research shows that doing at least some exercise is important for longer, healthier lives without dementia, heart disease, diabetes, or cancer. Other advantages are reaped right away: we’re happier and more energetic on a daily basis. canonical: https://time.com/video/LFjdP2dl/ og:title: The Benefits of "Exercise Snacks" og:description: Many of us feel like we’re too busy for exercise. Others actively avoid it. But research shows that doing at least some exercise is important for longer, healthier lives without dementia, heart disease, diabetes, or cancer. Other advantages are reaped right away: we’re happier and more energetic on a daily basis. og:url: https://time.com/video/LFjdP2dl/ og:image: https://cdn.jwplayer.com/v2/media/LFjdP2dl/poster.jpg?width=720 og:type: video.other twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: The Benefits of "Exercise Snacks" twitter:description: Many of us feel like we’re too busy for exercise. Others actively avoid it. But research shows that doing at least some exercise is important for longer, healthier lives without dementia, heart disease, diabetes, or cancer. Other advantages are reaped right away: we’re happier and more energetic on a daily basis. twitter:image: https://cdn.jwplayer.com/v2/media/LFjdP2dl/poster.jpg?width=720 --- * Health # The Benefits of "Exercise Snacks" > Sponsored content. Supplied in partnership with TIME. 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They are at time.com/newsletters and are separate from a paid subscription. ## Video: The Benefits of "Exercise Snacks" [Watch (HLS stream): The Benefits of "Exercise Snacks"](https://cdn.jwplayer.com/manifests/LFjdP2dl.m3u8) (3:22)  _Published 2024-07-02. Many of us feel like we’re too busy for exercise. Others actively avoid it. But research shows that doing at least some exercise is important for longer, healthier lives without dementia, heart disease, diabetes, or cancer. Other advantages are reaped right away: we’re happier and more energetic on a daily basis._ --- Jul 9, 2024 1:44 PM UTC --- ## More From This Series [All Videos](https://time.com/video/) [The Cost of 3 Unique Exercise Classes](/video/6qVINflP/) ### The Cost of 3 Unique Exercise Classes [Your Body on Exercise](/video/o4EznhPT/) ### Your Body on Exercise [Hoopilates: Hula Hoop Exercise](/video/2JwYOIMN/) ### Hoopilates: Hula Hoop Exercise --- ## Transcript One of the main cited barriers for why people aren't more active is a perceived lack of time. So we've been interested in that question of, how low can you go or what are small or the minimum doses of exercise you can do or get away with and still see some health benefits. And so that really led to the concepts discussed in the 1 minute workout. I don't want to suggest here that people can reap all of the benefits of the physical activity guidelines or lose massive amounts of weight by just doing, you know, a few brief heard efforts through the day. But we also know that it can move the needle in terms of things like your cardio spiratory fitness. That's like an all cause indicator of your risk of developing cardiovascular disease type two diabetes. And it's because it's such a robust measure of the functioning of so many physiological systems. So how well does your heart pump blood? How elastic are your blood vessels? How good is your muscles at taking up and using the oxygen to burn sugars and fats to produce energy. And so we know these small bursts are associated with some improvements in those various metrics, as well as certain health markers in the blood. There's an old saying that says, you know, your heart doesn't know what your muscles are doing. So that's a very liberating statement because it means it doesn't really matter. So a lot of our work has been done on a bike, but you could do a rolling ergometer. It could be swimming, it could be running outside. It could be stair climbing. Traditional alcenics that we did in gym classes as a child, burpees, air squats, jumping jacks, push ups, all of those things can count in terms of these bursts of activity or exercise snacks, and that's something that we're looking at now. E. You can imagine you're heading to the subway or the bus in the morning, you got a heavy backpack on, and you're just going to pick up the pace and walk briskly for 20 seconds, 30 seconds, up to a minute. You get to the office, you have the choice. You taking the elevator or taking the stairs. You take a few flights of stairs, and that's you get another exercise snack in. You know, I'm sitting right now as we're having this interview, to get up from my desk, do a series of air squats or burpees. So it's that idea of embedding these snacks or short bursts of vigorous effort. Throughout the day. And what it simultaneously does is it breaks up prolonged periods of sitting or sedentary behavior, which we know is also associated with, you know, less not good health outcomes. We want to break up our prolonged sitting as much as we can. ```json {"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"VideoObject","name":"The Benefits of \"Exercise Snacks\"","description":"Many of us feel like we’re too busy for exercise. Others actively avoid it. But research shows that doing at least some exercise is important for longer, healthier lives without dementia, heart disease, diabetes, or cancer. 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