In this solo episode of the No Days Off podcast, host Brian Gubernick introduces the concept of “exercise snacking,” which he defines as short bursts of physical activity performed multiple times throughout the day to break up sedentary periods. He explains that these brief bouts—lasting seconds to a few minutes—can raise heart rate, boost energy, and trigger health benefits such as improved cardiovascular fitness, higher metabolism, and better blood‑sugar control, even though they don’t constitute a full workout. Gubernick offers a suite of practical office‑ and travel‑friendly examples (e.g., 10 push‑ups at the top of each hour, air squats after Zoom calls, toe raises when sending emails, 30‑second wall sits on phone calls, pacing during calls, parking farther away, avoiding moving walkways). He cites research where participants who performed a single 10‑minute high‑intensity bike session achieved fitness gains comparable to those who performed 1‑minute hard intervals several times a day over six weeks, demonstrating that accumulated micro‑efforts can match traditional workouts. While acknowledging that snacks aren’t full workouts, he frames them within the No Days Off philosophy of extracting maximum health value from every minute. The episode ends with a direct challenge to listeners to identify and implement their own exercise snacks that fit their schedule and raise heart rate without major disruption.
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Thank you for joining me today. It's Brian Gubernick, and welcome to the No Days Off podcast, where we believe that every single day brings a new opportunity to get better. Today we're going to get better at health, and we're going to talk around this idea known as exercise snacking. Exercise snacks. What are exercise snacks? What's this, what's this crazy term all about? Here's the scoop. An exercise snack refers to a short burst of physical activity or a short burst of exercise that's performed multiple times throughout your day. It typically is performed to break up a sedentary period or, or a time when you've been rather idle. Call it what it is, a lot of what we do in the office, right? So the, an exercise snack is a burst of activity to break up the monotony, the constant sitting, the sedentary behavior that we see in the office. The idea behind the snack, the exercise snack, is to just incorporate some physical activity into our daily routine. Now, this is different than the full workout that you may get in the morning, or you may get at night, or maybe some of you do it in the middle of the day. This is different than that. What I'm talking about is just short bursts of activity. Now, these short bursts of activity, these exercise snacks, they They're going to boost your energy. They're going to get your blood flowing. They're going to get your heart rate up, right? You shouldn't break out in some crazy sweat. It shouldn't be that long enough in endurance or intensity to prompt something of that nature, but it will get your heart rate up. And the concept is that in doing so, you will trigger a whole host of of health benefits, like improving your cardiovascular fitness, like increasing your metabolism, like getting better control over your blood sugar levels. You're accumulating— through these snacks, you'll accumulate physical activity minutes throughout your day. And you'll reap the benefits of this movement, even if you can't do the longer workout session. So let me give you some ideas around exercise snacking, and these are things that I recently started being more proactive around in incorporating into my life. I have always done this sort of thing where I've, you know, just randomly done a set of push-ups, or I know I'm a little weird, but I will do these things, but I was not as purposeful. And then recently I was listening to Andrew Huberman, who I'm a big fan of his teachings, bring this concept up and actually give it a name. I don't necessarily think he coined the term exercise snack, but it's the first time I've heard it phrased in that way. And I've done it, but recently I've become a lot more purposeful around it. Some examples. If you're in it, I want you to picture yourself in an office, right? Random things. Maybe it's 10 or 20 push-ups at the top of every hour. Literally top of every hour, you drop down and you do 10 push-ups. Or maybe it's— 10 air squats at the end of every Zoom. I mean, hell, if you're like me and you have 30 Zooms a day, you're getting a lot of air squats in. Maybe it's 5 toe raises every time you send an email. Maybe it's a 30-second wall sit while you're on a phone call. Every time you're on the phone, 30-second wall sit. Maybe it's pacing around for 10 minutes of every call. Uh, it could be jumping jacks. Whenever you arrive at the office and whenever you're ready to leave the office. Now, other things in terms of snacks throughout your day, maybe it's things like taking the steps every single time you have an opportunity to do so. If you have steps as part of your daily routine, like if it's in your office, like you're regularly taking steps, maybe you go up and back down and back up and back down and back up again versus the one lap you typically would take. This is a snack. If you're driving somewhere for lunch, maybe instead of parking next to that restaurant, you park further in the parking lot and increase the distance of your walk. In airports, many of you are traveling regularly, an exercise snack may be avoiding the moving sidewalks and extending the walks throughout, throughout the terminal. I think you get the point. I'll tell you one thing that I found very interesting as I was looking more into this exercise snack concept. When some exercise researchers, uh, asked people to ride stationary bicycles in a lab for a single 10-minute session of intense interval-style training, or people could stop in the lab every few hours and pedal hard for about a minute's worth of intervals. What the exercise researchers found was that the group's gains in fitness were nearly identical after 6 weeks. So the people that were pedaling for 10 straight minutes of intense training in comparison to those that were training for 1-minute hard interval every few hours throughout the day, what they found was that they had nearly identical results. So snacking on exercise has proven to be effective as, as a longer and even more traditional workout. Now, I do not believe that your snacks constitute a full workout, but in the spirit of No Days Off, trying to get the most out of every minute, every 10 minutes, every hour, every day, every week, every month, every year, trying to maximize our health, I don't know. Is it worth multitasking here? If you're doing something, if you're talking on the phone, to maybe incorporate a little bit more movement and experience the health benefits that come along with it? I think so. So the focusing question for you— what exercise snacks can you incorporate into your routine today? What could you start doing that gets your heart rate up, or start doing that stresses your muscles a little bit more? That's not inconvenient, that jives with your calendar, doesn't change your routine, but just adds a little bit more movement and compounded over time you reap massive benefits from. Something to consider today. That's all we have for today in the No Days Off Podcast. Thank you so much for listening. And remember, every single day brings a new opportunity to get better. So let's get after it.
