Healthy Muscles? 2-min Walk or Squat Every 30-min is Enough|Study

If you don’t have time for a workout, taking a short 2-minute break from your sitting job and performing walking or squatting is enough for maintaining muscle mass with age, reveals a recent study. This Canadian research paper was published online in the Journal of Applied Physiology¹, it reveals that interruption of ‘activity snacks’ every 30 minutes between your log hour sitting job will improve your muscle mass as you age.

Let us find out more about this important research and what made scientists conclude this and how can it affect our life.

Walking or squat “activity snacks” beneficial for muscle health

Prolonged sitting is common in present-day work environments and we all know how a desk job can take a toll on your musculoskeletal health (ergonomic sitting can prevent this) and metabolism. It is known to scientists that taking a break between long hours of sitting at a job and performing a 5-minute walk is helpful in maintaining the blood sugar level. Being physical therapists we also recommend taking a break and performing 2-minute neck stretches can prevent neck pain.

But, the researchers at the University of Toronto Health Sciences¹, Canada were curious whether activity snacks interrupting the long sitting job has any beneficial effect on muscle health. To find the answer, they recruited 12 healthy individuals who reported having more than 150 min of moderate-to-vigorous physical activity per week and has a desk job with a daily sitting time of more than 7 h/day.

All 12 participants were instructed to abstain from the gym, sports and other physical activities for 4 days before the trial began. Instead, they were told to maintain more than 7,500 steps/day for 4 days and they all were under a controlled diet during the trial period.

Each participant underwent 3 trials with 3 different physical activities in each trial. These trials involved:

• Trial 1: Uninterrupted sitting; 
• Trial 2: Sitting with 15 “body-weight squats” (chair stand to calf raise) every 30 min; 
• Trial 3: Sitting with 2-min walks at 3.1 mph (average adult walking speed) every 30 min.

During the trial, their fasted blood sample and fasted muscle biopsy was collected before each trial to analyse the effect of physical activity on their muscle.

Result

All the participants successfully completed the trial and the final biopsy was analysed for each activity (sit, squat, walk). The researchers found that interrupting prolonged sitting with intermittent body weight squats and brief walking “activity snacks” resulted in improvements in how well amino acids repaired or replaced old or damaged muscle.

What does it mean to us?

We all know sedentary life has a bad effect on our overall health. One of the main causes of sedentary life is our work environment requiring us to sit for long hours. As I have mentioned earlier in this article, performing a few neck exercises can prevent neck pain due to desk job, this important study reminds that small how “activity snacks” is so crucial for our overall muscle health. I think, taking a 2-minute break every 30 minutes is not a big deal for us especially when it is so important for our musculoskeletal health.

Keep Reading: Desktop Ergonomics, These 5 Adjustments You Need to Do

Sunit. S. Ekka

Dr Sunit Sanjay Ekka is a physiotherapist in practice for the last 15 years. He has done his BPT from one of the premium Central Government physiotherapy colleges, ie, SVNIRTAR. The patient is his best teacher and whatever he gets to learn he loves to share it on his Youtube channel and blog.