When it comes to your daily exercise, scientists have found that the total distance you’re walking shouldn’t be the key factor to focus on. Instead, a recent study highlights how reducing prolonged sitting by taking more frequent walking breaks could have a more significant influence on your health.
Sitting down too much is believed to slow your metabolism and how efficiently you regulate your blood pressure and sugar levels.
In the study, scientists monitored 20 participants, measuring how much oxygen their bodies used after short and long stints of walking or using a stair climber machine. The activity ranged from 10 seconds to four minutes.
The bottom line: scientists found short stints of exercise used more oxygen and metabolic energy than ones with a longer duration.
“When we start walking, the energy expenditure is greater than after we've been walking for a few minutes,” said University of Milan PhD student and medical doctor Francesco Luciano, first author on the study.
This is because after a few minutes of activity, your body becomes more efficient, and your heart rate gets more steady. In other words, it’s more costly to start walking than continuing to walk.
That’s why researchers are encouraging people to focus on inserting more of these 'walking sprints' into their days.
About our experts:
Dr Francesco Luciano is a medical doctor and current PhD student at the University of Milan. His specialities are physiology and mechanics, which involve analysing how people walk, run and move.
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