Stamatakis and his team wanted to explore how encouraging incidental physical activity might overcome some barriers to movement and demonstrate benefits.
So, for the study, via wrist-worn accelerometers, which detect the frequency and intensity of movement, they measured the daily activity of 25,000 adults who do not do any structured exercise or sport.
By using this “very advanced methodology”, they were able to analyse the participants’ movements in detailed 10-second windows throughout the day. The average length of any vigorous activity was 45 seconds.
The researchers then looked at health outcomes seven years later.
“Three one-minute bouts per day was associated with 50 per cent reduction in cardiovascular mortality risk,” Stamatakis says, pointing out that this amounts to less than 30 minutes a week.
Though the study was not designed to explore the mechanism, Stamatakis says that it is “very likely” that the benefits, particularly the striking impact on cardiovascular health, are the result of improvements in cardiorespiratory fitness.
“One of the first adaptations, when the body is subjected to [vigorous physical activity] regularly, is it will improve the respiratory system and the cardiovascular system to be able to absorb more oxygen from the air and make it available to the muscles.”
Though Stamatakis says the best advice is to stick to the guidelines of at least 150 minutes of moderate-intensity or at least 75 minutes of high-intensity physical activity each week, along with a couple of strength-based activities, everyone can benefit from more unstructured movement.
“The key principle and the key advice here is move more during daily living. Do not necessarily rely on structured exercise sessions.”
He hopes this will be the beginning of a large body of work looking at how daily micro-patterns of movement can improve our health. The goal is to produce enough evidence to introduce a change to the next WHO guidelines in 2030 and include specific recommendations about short bursts of physical activity in our daily lives.
“This is the kind of activity that is most relevant to larger parts of the population. These are people that it would be very hard to motivate to get to a gym or exercise specifically.”
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Professor Ken Nosaka, the director of Exercise and Sports Science at Edith Cowan University, whose research focus is also the minimum amount of exercise we can do to be healthy, was not involved with the study but said it provided interesting context.
“I do not think that the current physical activity guidelines should be changed based on this study, but this is an important study to show that even a small amount of daily exercise is beneficial for health.”
And that, Stamatakis says, is the ultimate point: “All movement counts.”
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