All About Exercise Snacking with Prof. Martin Gibala

Should we break up our work days with short bouts of exercise? Should we exchange the single 45-minute workout for three 15-minute bouts, or even smaller units of physical activity? According to The One-Minute Workout author and McMaster kinesiology professor Martin Gibala, a series of short exercise bursts distributed throughout the day provides a wide variety of health and longevity benefits. In this episode, Prof. Gibala chats with host Shaun Francis about the benefits of exercise snacking, and how to do it right. Episode 91 webpage LINKS Check out Prof. Martin Gibala's website, and follow him on Twitter. Gibala wrote his book in collaboration with Eat Move Think producer Chris Shulgan. In it, Prof. Gibala distills the scientific evidence that shows how to gain the benefits of exercise in a more time-efficient manner than ever before. It's called The One-Minute Workout: Science Shows a Way to Get Fit That's Smarter, Faster, Shorter and it's available at Indigo and Amazon. In episode 91, Gibala references a large Norwegian study that suggested interval training is as good or better than traditional moderate exercise for longevity benefits. Here's the link from the British Medical Journal. Read Canada's 24-Hour Movement Guidelines  Exercise snacks can simply involve climbing up a set of stairs. Here's a 2021 study published in Frontiers in Sports and Active Living (and co-authored by Gibala) suggesting that brief, vigorous stair climbing is effective to improve aerobic fitness.  Here's Gibala's study that showed that one minute of all-out exercise three times a week could have similar benefits to 150 minutes of moderate exercise per week.   Read other studies and trials Gibala has co-authored here. Here's a link to the Oura ring fitness tracker discussed in this episode.    INSIGHTS  According to Gibala, breaking up our exercise into short bursts throughout the day may be a better strategy to promote longevity and fitness compared to a single bout of exercise in an otherwise sedentary workday. For example, three 15-minute exercise breaks throughout the day is better for us than one 45-minute workout, Gibala says. [04:33] Long bouts of sitting or reclining—what scientists term "sedentary behaviour"—come with their own health risks regardless of whether you're getting in a daily workout. For example, a sedentary lifestyle has been tied to such risks as developing diabetes, or dying from cardiovascular disease. That's part of the reason why the snacking strategy is so beneficial—it breaks up periods of inactivity. [09:49] Gibala recommends breaking up our levels of exercise intensity into green, yellow and red zones. A light walk around the block would be a green zone exercise, and running up and down a flight of stairs might bring you into the "sub-maximal" yellow zone, which corresponds to above 80 percent of maximal heart rate. And then the red zone is as hard as you can go. "An extremely vigorous sprint would put you in the red zone...The more intense the better," says Gibala. [10:21] One of Gibala's best-known studies (linked above) showed that three 20-second all-out sprints set into a 10-minute long protocol, repeated three times a week, could have the same benefits as the exercise guidelines' recommended 150 minutes of moderate exercise per week. In other words, one minute of hard exercise repeated three times a week could be as efficient as two and a half hours of physical activity. "We're talking minutes in order to reap some significant benefits," said Gibala. [10:57] One simple protocol for exercise snacking discussed by Shaun and Gibala is one minute of hard exercise followed by a minute-long break, repeated five times. Shaun tends to repeat the minute-on, minute-off protocol ten times, to great effect. "It kills me… more than any other routine that I do," Shaun says. "It's amazing, I can't even stop sweating when I'm done." Gibala points out that if you're interested in time efficiency, five repeats will provide 70-80 percent of the benefit in just half the time. [22:15]