Exercise snacks: Should you be having them? I do a lot of physical activity. Wanna talk about walking, jogging, resistance training, or HIIT? I am there. As I pass through my 50s, however, I am rethinking what exercise actually means. Today I want to look at so-called exercise snacking.
I hope you didn’t think we would explore how you can slip in bits of cookies or chips into your exercise program. Instead, we will look at how we can use bite-sized episodes of physical activity to optimize our health and well-being.
Here’s the context: Blue zone populations don’t specifically exercise. For example, individuals on the tiny island of Ikaria (Greece) appear almost always to dodge dementia and chronic diseases that strike too many Americans.
Could it be their diet? Or perhaps their culture and outlook on life? Some believe it is the strong red wine they commonly consume, while others point to clean air and good weather that draw them to an active outdoor lifestyle.
I am not going to explore all of those issues with you today. Let’s look at how the Greeks integrate exercise snacks to optimize health. Here is today’s takeaway:
The Ikarians who live longest tend to be poor people living in the island’s highlands. They do not engage in formal exercise, but get physical activity through gardening, walking to see neighbors, or doing yard work.
Can we engineer mindless movement into our lives? And if so, does it improve health (or do we need to move to Ikaria)?
In my medical training, I learned that to get meaningful improvement in cardiovascular health, one had to do at least an hour of physical activity daily. We now know this estimate to be wrong.
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