Five minutes every half-hour of strolling through the office — or just getting up and moving around when you work from home — can significantly reduce both blood pressure and blood sugar, according to a study published in the journal Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise. And moving as little as one minute every hour can still help lower your blood pressure. “Regular exercise should remain a top priority for anyone looking to improve and maintain their health,” says senior study author Keith Diaz, PhD, a scientist at the Center for Behavioral Cardiovascular Health at Columbia University in New York City. “But one cannot simply exercise in the morning and check it off their list. More and more research is showing that how you spend the rest of your day also matters.”
Any Break From Sitting Is Good, but Once Every 30 Minutes May Be Best for Blood Sugar
For the new study, scientists invited 11 healthy volunteers to go through five simulated work days in a lab, where they were required to stay seated all day except for brief walking breaks on a treadmill and the occasional trip to the bathroom. Participants could type on a laptop, read, and use their phones. Researchers also provided meals. On each of the five days volunteers came to the lab, they were randomly assigned to a different schedule of walking breaks: five minutes every 30 or 60 minutes, one minute every 30 or 60 minutes, or no walking at all. Compared with those sitting all day without any walking breaks, people who spent five minutes on a treadmill every half-hour saw a 58 percent reduction in blood sugar spikes after large meals. Shorter, less frequent movement breaks didn’t appear to impact blood sugar, however. “When our muscles aren’t used after hours and hours of sitting, they don’t fully help out to regulate blood sugar levels,” Diaz says. “So we think that regular short walks or ‘activity snacks’ help to activate the muscles to serve as better blood sugar regulators.”
Blood Pressure Also Benefits From Intermittent Walking Breaks
Every type of walking break helped lower blood pressure by 4 to 5 points, the study also found. This may be because of how much a seated posture restricts blood flow in the legs over time, Diaz says. “Regular short walks can help prevent the changes in blood pressure by regularly restoring blood flow to the legs, and it appears that relatively infrequent and short walks are enough to offset this harmful effect of sitting,” Diaz adds. One limitation of the study is the potential that its small size made it impossible to detect significant differences in outcomes based on the frequency or duration of the walking breaks throughout the day, the researchers note. Results from this study of light-intensity walking also might not reflect what would happen if people did moderate-to-vigorous-intensity movement breaks throughout the day. “The ‘exercise snack’ here was quite slow walking, only 2 miles per hour and well below a brisk level,” says Bethany Barone Gibbs, PhD, associate professor and chair of the department of epidemiology and biostatistics at the West Virginia University School of Public Health in Morgantown. “This would be very slow strolling or the intensity levels of doing some light household chores rather than more intense physical activity we would consider to be moderate or vigorous intensity and count toward weekly physical activity goals,” says Gibbs, who wasn’t involved in the new study.
A 5-Minute Walk Can Help When You Can’t Squeeze In a Workout
For optimal health, most adults need at least 150 minutes a week of moderate-intensity aerobic activity as well as two days of muscle-building workouts, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. But this can be hard to achieve. It was especially difficult when stay-at-home orders shuttered gyms and forced people to work remotely during the COVID-19 pandemic, Gibbs notes. Whether you’ve got a good exercise routine going or not, a workday interspersed with “exercise snacks” can help improve your health, says Matthew Ahmadi, PhD, an exercise researcher at the University of Sydney in Australia who wasn’t involved in the new study. “Even light walking lasting a few minutes at a time to break up sedentary time can be effective in improving our metabolic health, which will lead to better overall health and lower disease risk,” Ahmadi says.
