EXERCISE SNACKING
Exercise helps your muscles use blood sugar for energy and muscle.
You can still benefit from shorter sessions even if you have trouble dedicating more time to exercise throughout the week. For example, try aiming for 10-minute exercise sessions 3 times a day for 5 days, with the goal of 150 minutes per week.
So-called “exercise snacks” also help prevent the damage that sitting for prolonged periods can do. Exercise snacks mean you break up your sitting time every 30 minutes for just a few minutes throughout the day. Some recommended exercises include light walking or simple resistance exercises, like squats or leg raises.
Other useful forms of exercise include: light weightlifting, brisk walking, dancing, jumping jacks, half squats
Any activity that gets you up and moving — regardless of the intensity — beats a sedentary lifestyle.
JAPANESE WALKING
By pushing exercise INTENSITY, you can get the same health benefits with less time at the gym. While it is considered generally safe, some research has shown that HIIT (high intensity interval training) exercise may lead to training-related injuries. IWT (interval walking training) or Japanese walking, on the other hand, dials down the intensity and is generally considered safe.
According to original research on Japanese walking published in Mayo Clinic Proceedings in 2009, the standard IWT protocol consists of alternating intervals of:
3 minutes of fast walking (roughly 70% of peak aerobic capacity)
3 minutes of slow walking (40% of peak aerobic capacity)
The minimum recommended five sets of intervals amount to 30 minutes of walking five days per week.
For this study, Japanese researchers recruited more than 200 adults with an average age of 63 to test how IWT fared against traditional “continuous intensity” walking.
They found that IWT was superior to traditional walking for improving various health markers, including:
blood pressure, blood glucose, body mass index (BMI), aerobic capacity, strength (an indicator of stability and balance)
Just as important as those health benefits, the protocol was something the participants could stick with long term.
