Key Takeaways
Brief, intense exercise snacks can help improve fitness
People’s heart and lung fitness improved through five-minute bursts of activity sprinkled throughout their day
Most were able to pick up the habit of regular, brief exercise breaks
THURSDAY, Oct. 9, 2025 (HealthDay News) — “Fun-sized” bits of exercise sprinkled throughout the day might help boost the fitness of inactive folks, a new evidence review says.
These exercise “snacks” — intentional short bursts of physical activity — significantly improved heart and lung fitness among adults, researchers reported Oct. 7 in the British Journal of Sports Medicine.
People also found it easy to pick up the habit of bite-sized workout breaks, results showed.
“The time efficient nature of exercise snacks may help overcome common barriers to physical activity, such as perceived lack of time and low motivation,” wrote a team led by Hugo Olmedillas, an assistant professor of physical education and sport at the University of Oviedo in Spain.
“Exercise snacks may enhance adherence to regular physical activity by providing short, flexible exercise bouts that are easier to integrate into daily routines,” the team concluded.
About a third of adults and 4 in 5 teens fail to meet minimum recommended physical activity levels, researchers said in background notes. People are encouraged to get at least 300 minutes of moderate exercise or 75 to 150 minutes of vigorous exercise each week.
Exercise snacks, like stair climbing or weightlifting, might help fill this gap by getting people off their feet for brief spells, researchers theorized.
For their review, researchers pooled data from 11 clinical trials in Australia, Canada, China and the U.K., involving a total of 414 inactive adults.
The team defined exercise snacks as bursts of moderate to vigorous activity lasting five minutes or less, done at least twice daily for three to seven days a week.
Young and middle-aged adults tended to use stair climbing for their exercise snacking, while older adults performed leg-focused strength exercises or tai chi.
Results showed that these exercise snacks increased people’s fitness by 5% to 17%.
“These improvements were observed even when the total exercise volume was substantially lower than current physical activity guidelines, indicating that brief, vigorous intensity exercise bouts performed frequently throughout the day can induce favorable physiological adaptations,” researchers wrote.
These small fitness gains from exercise snacking should be expected to lead to better health, they said.
“Even modest improvements in cardiorespiratory fitness have been associated with a 15% reduction in mortality risk,” researchers noted.
More importantly, the practice was easy to incorporate into daily life. About 91% started to take in exercise snacks, and 83% stuck with it, researchers found.
“Their easy integration into daily routines addresses common barriers, such as lack of time and low motivation, facilitating physical activity promotion,” researchers wrote. “Public health policies should aim to integrate exercise snacks into daily life by encouraging movement breaks throughout the day.”
More information
The University of British Columbia has more on exercise snacks.
SOURCES: BMJ, news release, Oct. 7, 2025; British Journal of Sports Medicine, news release, Oct. 7, 2025
What This Means For You
People who have trouble finding time to work out should try incorporating exercise snacks into their daily routine.
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