Incidental activity can reduce our risk of cardiovascular disease and even death. You can try some simple forms of it in a meeting, on a flight or while reading this article.
It can be easy to spend an entire day sitting. First at your desk at work, then perhaps in your car, followed by a couple of hours on the sofa. Before you know it, you’re having dinner and realise you haven’t exercised all day.
Many global studies have found that a sedentary lifestyle can increase the risk of serious health conditions. Everything we can do to decrease sedentary time therefore benefits our overall health. But it can be challenging to find the time.
That’s where incidental exercise comes in. This is the moving around we do outside of deliberate exercise. It’s also known as “non-exercise activity thermogenesis”, or NEAT. This refers to any energy we use for movement that isn’t sleeping, eating or deliberate exercise.
Incidental exercise can be as simple as tapping your leg when you are sitting down or doing the washing up. “Smaller movements like shifting posture, rolling the shoulders or flexing the feet count too,” says Narayanan.
Incidental exercise is emerging as a surprisingly powerful tool for protecting our health, helping us to burn more calories, reduce the risk of cardiovascular disease, and even lower our risk of death.
Once we’re aware of this “incidental activity”, we can build more of it into our everyday routine with a few simple lifestyle tweaks. Here are some you might want to try.
Fidgeting
Take, for instance, leg fidgeting. Growing up, we’re encouraged not to fidget, which is seen as a sign of boredom and not paying attention. There are many reasons to ignore this advice.
During prolonged periods of sitting, muscles in our legs are relatively inactive. This reduces the regular muscle contractions that help to clear glucose from the bloodstream and support healthy blood circulation, says Narayanan.
But fidgeting increases muscle activity and therefore helps us to burn more calories compared with when we are sitting still, a recent study has found.
Move often
Unlike structured activity, incidental movement does not require a gym membership or for us to carve out specific time to move.
We often forget that everyday household activities can decrease sedentary time. Cooking, gardening and vacuuming are also forms of incidental exercise.
We don’t need to spend hours moving to gain health benefits. Just four minutes per day of brief, incidental bursts of activity that last less than a minute can help to offset the increased risk of cardiovascular diseases from sedentary time.
By paying attention to opportunities that help us increase our movement throughout the day, people may be able to increase the intensity of these activities.
This could include walking faster than your normal pace to get to your destination or parking further away when going to the shops. While you’re there, consider using a basket instead of a trolley. Before you realise it, you may well have strengthened your muscles by carrying a few kilos of shopping around.
Habit piggybacking
Large fitness goals can feel overwhelming, so another strategy to introduce movement throughout the day could involve “piggybacking” on activities you are already doing.
This simply involves adding some movement to an activity you are already doing. You could try doing a calf raise while brushing your teeth, a leg raise under your desk, or going for a walk while on a call instead of sitting down.
Best of all, the more incidental activity you do throughout the day, the more purposeful it can become over time.
With that in mind, I’m going to start unashamedly tapping my legs during meetings. I might get some funny looks, but I’ll know that I’m benefitting my health.
Credit: bbc.com
