{"id":779091,"date":"2026-07-04T04:37:36","date_gmt":"2026-07-04T04:37:36","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/779091\/"},"modified":"2026-07-04T04:37:36","modified_gmt":"2026-07-04T04:37:36","slug":"the-five-minute-trick-that-made-me-fitter-and-more-focused-at-work","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/779091\/","title":{"rendered":"The five-minute trick that made me fitter and more focused at work"},"content":{"rendered":"

For many of us, a sedentary lifestyle is an unavoidable part of modern life<\/a>. Commuting<\/a>, relaxing, and (if you have an office job) working are all activities that entail a lot of sitting. Without really realising, you can easily spend the vast majority of your day on your rear at no major inconvenience. According to the NHS, many adults in the UK spend around nine hours a day sitting: the equivalent of 63 hours or two and a half days a week.<\/p>\n

This is, unfortunately, a problem. \u201cProlonged sitting is now recognised as an independent risk factor for poor health,<\/a>\u201d explains Kelly Mackintosh, a world-renowned researcher in sedentary behaviour and professor of sport and exercise science at Swansea University. \u201cIt increases the risk of cardiovascular disease, type 2 diabetes, certain cancers, poorer mental health, and all-cause mortality.\u201d<\/p>\n

Part of the reason is mechanical, adds Nell Mead, physiotherapist. \u201cWhen your leg muscles stay switched off for hours, the contractile activity [movement] that normally helps them take up glucose and break down fat slows right down, and the sitting posture itself compresses the blood vessels in your legs, reducing circulation.\u201d Prolonged sitting can also increase your injury risk, she says: \u201cWhen you stay still for long periods and then suddenly ask your body to do something high-load or awkward, like lifting something heavy straight after a long stint at a desk, you\u2019re more likely to pick up a muscle strain or disc injury, because the tissues haven\u2019t been primed to move.\u201d<\/p>\n

This all sounds terrible, but perhaps, like me, you\u2019ve assumed you are avoiding the major pitfalls by exercising regularly. I commute by electric bike, take the stairs, strength-train frequently<\/a> and run at least once a week. Health-wise, I feel like I\u2019m in good nick and so haven\u2019t really worried about my extensive career of sitting.<\/p>\n

But frequent exercise, it turns out, has not saved me from the perils of sedentaryism.<\/p>\n

\u201cEven if you meet the recommended physical activity guidelines (or excel!), it doesn\u2019t fully cancel out the harm of sitting still for 10-plus hours a day,\u201d Mackintosh says. \u201cThis is sometimes called the \u2018active couch potato effect\u2019\u2026 the two behaviours [sedentary time and exercise time] act fairly independently on the body. It\u2019s part of why public health guidance has shifted from just \u2018be more active\u2019 to also \u2018sit less, move more.’\u201d<\/p>\n

One suggested solution is \u201cmovement snacking\u201d \u2013 small bits of easy movement at regular intervals. Unlike exercise snacking, which includes more formalised movements (walking up stairs, bodyweight squats, stretching, etc.), movement snacking is as simple as a short, five-minute walk. And according to one recent study<\/a>, when done every hour it can offset the damage of being seated for long periods. Plus, the study found it boosted mood and reduced fatigue, with no effect on work performance.<\/p>\n

\u201cPhysically, a short walk reactivates the leg muscles\u2019 glucose and fat metabolism and relieves the compression in the lower limb blood vessels caused by sitting,\u201d Mead says, while the walk also works psychologically like a reset button, explaining the instant improvements in fatigue and mood.<\/p>\n

Movement snacking can also improve your baseline fitness, keeping you moving for longer: \u201cPoor cardiorespiratory or muscular endurance is a known risk factor for injury, as less fit people work at a higher percentage of their maximum capacity and fatigue faster. Fatigue changes movement patterns in ways that load tissues that aren\u2019t used to it. So the fitness gains from exercise snacking aren\u2019t just about feeling more energetic; they plausibly reduce injury risk too.\u201d<\/p>\n

Rather than keeping you away from your desk, research shows it can boost productivity. Mead points to a study of orthopaedic surgeons who hold long, awkward, static positions during operations. \u201cIt found that giving them short movement and stretching breaks meaningfully reduced their discomfort and fatigue and improved their focus, without lengthening surgery time. If it works mid-operation, it\u2019s a good sign it\u2019ll work at a desk.\u201d<\/p>\n

Having tried it, I can confirm it had no significant impact on productivity while significantly cheering me up. Every hour in the office, I would take a circuit of the floors to get my bones moving. I was slightly self-conscious of these walks as I ran out of different paths. I worried what my colleagues would think of the sheepish brunette repeatedly wandering past them.<\/p>\n

But it really did help with my focus, mood, and energy levels, particularly when I didn\u2019t fall prey to my phone on my little walks. If I succumbed to a delicious scroll, I found my brain was just as muddled by the time I got back to my desk.<\/p>\n

By the afternoon, I had happily settled into this routine: getting down to business for an hour before sauntering to the kitchen\/bathroom\/canteen\/fire exit and back. I found myself instinctively rolling my shoulders, which probably further released tension, and when I returned, I found it far easier to sit with better posture.<\/p>\n

When I tried this at home, it was a bit more of a struggle, thanks to the heatwave. My mind was getting foggy just from sitting in the heat and so a walk around did not make me more refreshed. It did, however, give me more structure \u2013 and I still got all my work done.<\/p>\n

Even if you cannot have breaks as often as recommended, it will still be effective, Mackintosh says.<\/p>\n

\u201cHardly anyone hits \u2018perfect\u2019 adherence (in the study only around a tenth of people in the most frequent group managed to stick rigidly to their target), so don\u2019t be discouraged if you miss some breaks. Even partial adherence showed real benefit. And classic sitting-related issues like lower back stiffness, post-meal blood sugar spikes and leg heaviness are exactly the kind of thing a five-minute walk is well suited to interrupt.\u201d<\/p>\n

Whether this made me fitter I couldn\u2019t possibly say. But it certainly made me feel better, making it easy to stick to. In the long term, that can only be a good thing for my health.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"For many of us, a sedentary lifestyle is an unavoidable part of modern life. Commuting, relaxing, and (if…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":779092,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[37],"tags":[49,48,5105,407,84,143800,890,5368],"class_list":["post-779091","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-fitness","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-features","tag-fitness","tag-health","tag-health-and-wellbeing","tag-lifestyle","tag-work"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/779091","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=779091"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/779091\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/779092"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=779091"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=779091"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=779091"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}