Our time is a precious resource so when you take thirty minutes to an hour out of your day to exercise you want to get the most you possibly can out of that time. If we feel like we are wasting our time then the chance of you making exercise a habit for the rest of your life is slim.
Therefore you might be wondering how we can make the exercise we are doing as impactful as possible?
Many people turn to complicated workouts, or supplements, or working out at a specific time of day, or under a certain condition (fasted workouts for example). None of those things make that big of a difference, and in fact could be counter productive in reaching your goals.
Ultimately the goal of exercise is to improve our health.
No matter what your goals are, being healthy is the first step to achieving them. One way to measure how effective exercise is would be to measure health outcomes after doing some form of exercise.
In addition, we know that actions that improve our health do not work in isolation. So while exercising should improve your health there are other parts of your lifestyle that will impact your exercise and therefore its ability to positively affect your health.
Therefore if we want our exercise to be as effective as possible in improving our health we need to optimize all the inputs into our exercise in order to do that.
Here is an example that you might be familiar with.
Say your goal is to increase the amount of muscle you have. You know resistance training is the best form of exercise to do this, so you pay someone to come up with the most ideal resistance training program completely customized to you and you execute it perfectly. However, there are other lifestyle factors that will impact how effective this resistance training workout is. If you don’t eat enough protein and you don’t sleep enough (hindering your recovery), the chances of you building muscle is going to be slim, even if the resistance training program is superior and you execute it perfectly.
This is just one example of how other aspects of your lifestyle can impact the effectiveness of your exercise, but there are more.
What if I told you that the amount of movement you get outside of your workout will impact the health outcomes you get from the workout itself?
It is true!
You know how I harp on movement throughout the day being the foundation of all other physical activity? Well here is another reason to make sure you are active outside of your formal exercise…
Turns out being physically active throughout the day enhances the metabolic impact of exercise (Inactivity Causes Resistance to Improvements in Metabolism After Exercise, 2022)!
What researchers from the above study found was that if you were physically active over the course of the day and then exercised, the following day you burn more fat, and have lower triglycerides! Another way to say this is that by moving throughout the day and then exercising you are more metabolically flexible.
You might be wondering what the threshold was for movement throughout the day which improved metabolic flexibility the following day?
Luckily for us the researchers went to great extent to try and quantify this.
Based on their experiments they found that anything below 5000 steps a day resulted in higher triglycerides and an impacted ability to burn fat the next day. However when researchers used a cut off of 8500 steps, triglyceride levels and fat burning were normal. There is a gray area between 5000 and 8500 based on this research where accumulating somewhere within that range may be fine, but we don’t know. However, given that most research on health outcomes related to steps shows a sweet spot between 7-10 thousand steps a day I am going to lean towards that range as being optimal.
In addition researchers also tested if short bursts of high intensity exercise spread throughout the day could achieve the same thing as taking 8500 steps. What they found was that doing 4 second all out sprints on a bike to break up every hour of sitting achieved the same results!
In other words you could take 8500 steps spread throughout the day OR break up every hour of sitting with some sort of high intensity exercise and achieve the same level of metabolic flexibility!
At this point it is hard to argue against the fact that moving throughout the day has immense benefits for all health related goals. It is easy today to be sedentary most of the day, many of our jobs even require us to be in front of a computer most of the day.
In addition, our ancestral brain views this sedentary behavior as a good thing as it is programmed to conserve energy. The reason our brain encourages us to be sedentary is because up until the last few decades there was no guarantee that there will be food whenever we need it. So going for a walk just for the sake of walking, would have been a bad thing from a survival perspective for nearly all of human history.
Our modern lifestyles compliment our natural instincts. Combine this with the fact that our modern food environment is also working against us with a ton of high calorie, hyper palatable, nutritionally void foods available 24/7 and I think we can see a big reason as to why so many of us are struggling with our health.
So the first hurdle we need to overcome to put this research into practice is actually doing what our modern society and our ancestral brains don’t want us to do…move…and not move for the sake of finding food, but instead move to replicate finding food and correct an ancestral mismatch.
One of the best tricks to doing this is to tie movement into something you do each day.
The most obvious habit is eating. Most of us eat 3 meals a day, so what I encourage you to do is make movement part of your eating habit. Before or after you eat, move your body for 10-20 minutes. That movement could be walking, but it could also be going up and down a flight of stairs in your apartment, or doing some body weight exercises, or going for a quick bike ride.
Another habit some people have is taking the dog for a walk. The dog needs to go out a few times a day, so when the dog has to go out why not take the dog for a walk?
Another option some people find effective is to set a timer, especially when they are working at a desk, so every hour or so you get up and move for 10-20 minutes. When the timer goes off it is time to move, and that might look like pacing around the office or going for a walk around the office building or going up and down the stairwell in your office.
Another thing office workers can do is to take walking meetings. Instead of sitting down in a meeting room, go out for a walk with your colleagues.
If you tend to have to be on the phone a lot at work, get up and walk around the office while you are on a call.
I should also mention ways to implement the high intensity option to inject movement into your day.
I think this might be impractical for most, but in some cases it might be doable, especially if you work from home and have some type of cardio equipment you feel comfortable doing all out sprints on. Setting a timer to go off every hour of your work day and hopping on the bike to do some 4s sprints could be feasible for someone in this situation. If you don’t have a piece of cardio equipment another option would be to do some intense kettlebell swings for say 30 seconds. Even if you don’t have any equipment and you only have your body weight you could try something like burpees.
The last thing I want to mention is about the all or nothing mindset. Oftentimes people will get stuck in the fact that they can’t do what is optimal so they do nothing at all. If you are sedentary the entire day does that mean you should skip your workout?
NO!!!!!!
If you only get 5000 steps in your day or miss a couple of all out sprints during your day does that mean there is no point to working out?
NO!!!!!
This information is meant to encourage you to move your body more, not to feel like a failure if you can’t implement it perfectly. SOMETHING IS ALWAYS BETTER THAN NOTHING! Taking 5000 steps a day and working out is always going to be better than taking 1000 steps a day and skipping your workout because it will be less effective!
The options for movement are endless, but it is not easy. Finding an option that works for you in your specific situation and then tying it to a habit so it becomes your norm is going to be the hardest part.
What I have written above should hopefully spark some ideas for you but if you need more ideas and other ways to reach your goals sign up for my newsletter using the form below. Each week I put out content for free that contains actionable pieces of information you can put to work right away.
References
Inactivity Causes Resistance to Improvements in Metabolism After Exercise. (2022, April 1). PubMed. Retrieved June 12, 2024, from https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35025844/