how A 5-minute walk every 30 minutes could reduce the risks of a long day at the office.
According to a new study, a brief, leisurely walk around the office or home every half-hour will help improve your blood pressure and blood sugar levels.
Taking calls while walking may help counteract the harmful health impacts of long periods of sitting.
Even if you get plenty of exercises, sitting at a computer all day might be harmful to your health. A new study sheds new light on how many activities breaks deskbound professionals require throughout the day to offset some of the harmful impacts of all those inactive hours.
According to a study published in the journal Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise, five minutes per half-hour of strolling through the workplace — or simply getting up and moving around when working from home — can considerably reduce both blood pressure and blood sugar. Even moving for one minute per hour will help decrease your blood pressure.
"Regular exercise should remain a top priority for anyone trying to improve and maintain their health," says senior study author Keith Diaz, Ph.D., a scientist at Columbia University in New York City's Center for Behavioral Cardiovascular Health. "However, one cannot simply exercise in the morning and cross it off their to-do list. More and more studies indicate that how you spend the remainder of your day is as important."
Any break from sitting is beneficial, but once every 30 minutes may be optimal for blood sugar control.
For the current study, scientists recruited 11 healthy volunteers to participate in five simulated work days in a lab, where they were expected to remain seated throughout the day except for brief walking breaks on a treadmill and the odd trip to the restroom. Participants could use a laptop to type, read, and use their phones. Meals were also provided by the researchers.
On each of the five days that volunteers arrived at the lab, they were randomly allocated to one of three walking schedules: five minutes every 30 or 60 minutes, one minute every 30 or 60 minutes, or no walking at all.
People who spent five minutes on a treadmill every half-hour reported a 58 percent reduction in blood sugar increases after large meals when compared to those who sat all day without any walking breaks. Shorter, less frequent movement breaks, on the other hand, had no effect on blood sugar.
"When our muscles aren't exercised after hours and hours of sitting, they don't properly contribute to blood sugar regulation," Diaz explains. "We believe that regular short walks or 'activity snacks' assist to engage the muscles, allowing them to function as better blood sugar regulators."
Intermittent walking breaks are also beneficial for blood
pressure.
The study also discovered that all types of walking breaks helped reduce blood pressure by 4 to 5 points. Diaz believes this is due to how much a seated position inhibits blood flow in the legs over time. "Regular short walks can help prevent blood pressure abnormalities by restoring blood flow to the legs on a regular basis, and it appears that relatively infrequent and short walks are sufficient to offset this negative effect of sitting," Diaz adds.
According to the researchers, one weakness of the study is that its small sample size may have made it impossible to detect significant variations in outcomes based on the frequency or duration of walking breaks during the day. The findings of this light-intensity walking study may also not reflect what would happen if patients had moderate-to-vigorous-intensity activity breaks throughout the day.
"The exercise snack' here was fairly modest walking, only 2 miles per hour and much below a brisk pace," explains Bethany Barone Gibbs, PhD, associate professor and chair of the epidemiology and biostatistics department at West Virginia University School of Public Health in Morgantown.
"This would be extremely leisurely strolling or the intensity levels of performing some minor household duties," adds Gibbs, who was not part in the new study.
When you can't fit in a workout, a 5-minute walk can help.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, most individuals require at least 150 minutes of moderate-intensity aerobic activity per week, as well as two days of muscle-building workouts. However, this can be difficult to achieve. During the COVID-19 pandemic, stay-at-home orders closed gyms and forced individuals to work remotely, according to Gibbs.
Whether you have a regular exercise program or not, a workday punctuated with "exercise snacks" can help enhance your health, according to Matthew Ahmadi, PhD, an exercise researcher at the Australia's University of Sydney who was not involved in the current study.
"Even a few minutes of mild walking to break up inactive time can be useful in boosting our metabolic health, which will lead to better overall health and lower illness risk," Ahmadi says.
