How activity microbursts can improve your health |
From running up stairs, to rigorous gardening: these everyday activities could boost your health and help you live longer.
Everyone knows that the key to a healthy long life is to exercise and eat well. But what if you simply don't have the time to slog it out at the gym, or chalk up 10,000 steps a day? The good news is that doing everyday activities with more rigour and energy can achieve huge benefits. Think running up the stairs, power walking around the house, or playing with your children or pets.
If you've followed exercise science in the last three years, you might have encountered a new term: vigorous intermittent lifestyle physical activity or VILPA. Also described through the various monikers of "exercise snacking," "snacktivity," or "activity microbursts," it's the latest solution to a long-term problem – how best to coax the most reluctant of exercisers to sit less and move more?
In the past decade, high-intensity interval training (HIIT) – which involves pushing the body to its limits through brief explosive bursts of running, cycling and bodyweight exercises like squats or jumping jacks – has become a popular workout for more time-pressed gym goers. It has also been shown to improve blood sugar control, cholesterol, blood pressure and body fat.
According to Mark Hamer, professor of sport and exercise medicine at University College London, VILPA is a scaled down form of HIIT. It simply means doing everyday activities with slightly more gusto with the aim of raising your heart rate for one or two minutes at a time.
Hamer explains that the idea of VILPA first arose when he and his colleagues were analysing movement data collected by fitting wrist worn wearables to people who did no formal exercise. The scientists noticed that, despite not playing sport or hitting the gym, some individuals were managing considerable amounts of movement simply by going about their daily lives. This ranged from fast bursts of walking while commuting to work, to going up stairs. "Much of this movement was accrued in very short chunks," says Hamer. "This led to this concept of microbursts."
To their surprise, Hamer and colleagues discovered that these microbursts of movement were linked to health benefits. In a 2022 study, using data from 25,241 people across the UK, Hamer and scientists at the University of Sydney found that just three or four one-minute bouts of VILPA each day was sufficient to provide a 40% reduction in the risk of premature death from all causes, and a 49% reduction in risk of death from cardiovascular disease, compared with people who did little movement at all. A more recent study also concluded that just over four minutes of VILPA each day can offset some of the risks of a sedentary lifestyle for heart health.
"Through doing their daily activities in brief bursts of higher intensity, several times throughout the day, people can still attain health benefits to lower their risk of chronic diseases," says Matthew Ahmadi, a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Sydney. "It [VILPA] can also help stave off frailty which becomes very important as we age."
Ahmadi describes these findings as especially exciting, because