Your hour long workout is not enough to offset all that sitting you’re doing. This is your sign to start using exercise snacks to add more activity to your day.

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In my journalism days, I was incredibly active.

I’d do interval cardio in the mornings before heading into the news station (fasted, of course because back then we thought that was a thing).

Then I’d lug a camera and tripod (about 40-50 pounds) around while filming sports stories and highlights during the day.

After I wrapped up my late night sports segment, it was off to the gym to lift weights well after midnight.

Sometimes I think about how crazy it is that my entire daily schedule has shifted from night owl to morning person (I blame my interns).

When I left journalism and started working in corporate public relations, the cubicle lifestyle hit.

So did the weight gain.

And the anxiety (but that’s for another newsletter).

Even though I was fully-certified in fitness and had coached people to stay active, it was next to impossible for me to apply my knowledge to my own experience.

I’d hop in between programs.

There was never a great time to actually train.

Travel and extended work days fried my brain and drained my energy so when I was home, all I wanted to do was rest some more.

But honestly, the biggest culprits for the weight gain was my new sedentary lifestyle.

Being confined to a desk with very minimal movement in my day was a recipe for disaster.

And the worst part is that even our little workout routines are not enough to offset the damages from sitting all day.

We need to move even more

Humans are designed to move throughout the day.

Which sounds freaking intimidating and demotivating as hell.

Because in what timeline are we going to have the time to move even more?

It wasn’t until years later when I learned how to simplify training, movement, and my life that I realized I was completely overthinking the entire approach to exercise.

Today, I’m going to save you time, money, stress and calories by teaching you how to maximize movement even when you are stuck.

This applies if you are an office worker, or if your living room is your office.

You can also use this if you are an overwhelmed parent—this is one of my favorite ways to stay active when my Interns are at home with me.

I truly believe that systems like exercise snacks and microworkouts are the future of fitness for busy people.

Let’s get into it.

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Your hour-long workout is still not enough

More people are understanding the importance of regular exercise.

We hit the gym for our pilates, strength training or barre classes.

Go ruck it up with our buddies at CrossFit.

But the problem most people face is that you push so hard during the session that it leaves you wasted for the rest of the day—one hour of brutal work followed by 23 hours of sitting.

The CDC estimates that Americans on average sit for as long as eight hours per day.

We are not meant to wake up, sit in a car, then sit at a desk, then sit in a car, only to come home and sit on the couch.

It’s killing you slowly.

Even when you add that punishing workout session to the equation, this is still too much sitting.

And being sedentary like this will add up to a steaming hot bag of monkey excrement:

• Stiff neck and back
• Achy knees
• Varicose veins
• Lethargy and anxiety
• Eye strain from staring at screens
• Lowered metabolic output (from not moving enough)

We need to do better.

But how when you are supposed to be glued to your fluorescent lit desk all fucking day long?

The answer is to add more movement breaks or exercise snacks into your day.

What the hell are exercise snacks anyway?

A simple definition is just performing intermittent movement throughout your day.

The movements are short bouts of exercise, not full-on workouts (we’re talking one to two minutes in total).

It’s accessible to even the busiest of office workers or parents.

Everyone has time to get up and move for 60 seconds.

With exercise snacking, you’re working exercise into your day rather than shaping your entire day around your workout.

When I’m home with the kids, the busiest days mean potentially skipping workouts.

Then getting annoyed at myself and even the kids for skipping my workouts.

There had to be a better way. So I started leaning into the concept of intermittent exercise.

This aligns with our hunter-gatherer ancestors that probably moved in similar ways throughout their days:

• Walking long distances to hunt or graze
• Sprinting after a potential kill (or away from home)
• Climbing up rocks or trees for better vantage points
• Exerting strength to kill, process, and carry a fresh kill back to camp

There is research to support this fitness concept and the results prove just how incredible exercise snacking can be for your overall health: 

• Improved cardiovascular and metabolic health, such as lower blood sugar and better endurance
• Enhanced muscle strength
• Reduced dementia risk
• Stress relief
• And a potential reduction in cancer risk

When I’d work in a corporate office setting, I had to get up and move around to avoid feeling stiff.

Unless you’re literally chained to your desk, you’re probably already taking small breaks to move:

• Go to the bathroom
• Grab some more coffee
• Sneak some snacks from the candy jar
• Head off to (yet another) meeting
• Check in at Cindy’s desk to gossip about Jacob

With exercise snacks, you just habit stack the exercise into your routine.

Whenever you get up throughout the day, try to take just 30-60 seconds to add in some exercise snacking style movement.

How to incorporate exercise snacks into your busy day

Time to lock in and get focused. But I promise it won’t be all work and no play.

Honestly, I think the best way to stay consistent with exercise snacking is to make a game out of it.

Get some of your coworkers involved

I recently did a corporate office presentation on exercise and safe practices when training and working in an office environment.

It was really cool to find out that a few weeks afterwards, several of the attendees were utilizing a few of my concepts.

That’s baked-in accountability (and likely removes some of the potential embarrassment over doing exercise at your desk or cubicle).

It’s kinda like high intensity interval training.

But, the best part is that with exercise snacks, you get a much longer rest period (up to an hour, sometimes more) before your next intense bout of movement (you won’t feel as drained as you do after that 40-minute HIIT class).

The snack only lasts about a minute.

You shouldn’t get sweaty or need a change of clothes to knock out a minute of continuous activity a few times per day.

It works.

As long as you get over the potential embarrassment, stay true to your own self and health and just keep showing up consistently.

Pick an interval or a trigger

You can set a timer to remind you to get up and move.

For instance, every 60 minutes, you’ll get up and perform some exercise.

Or you can use the trigger approach.

In this scenario, you’ll need a prompt that will direct you to get moving.

During my work day, if I pass under my doorframe pull-up bad, my trigger is to knock out 1-2 pull-ups.

Pick your exercises

Ideally, this will be short, intense and accessible.

Examples of exercise snacks:

• Stair climbing
• Jumping jacks
• Jumping rope
• Chair squats
• Lunges
• Push-ups
• Mountain climbers

But my favorite way to do this: Bodyweight squats

A study suggested that performing 100 squats per day—broken up into 10 squats every 45 minutes—may significantly improve your body’s ability to control blood sugar.

Another study compared those squats to your every day walk: Every 45 minutes during their 8.5-hour workday, participants performed 10 bodyweight squats. And the squats showed just as many benefits as walking.

(You should still walk, though … I don’t like the idea that this would potentially discourage people from getting their steps up. Walking should be a life-long habit.)

I’m not too proud to go into a bathroom stall and knock out a solid set of bodyweight squats.

It’s one of many things that I turn into my own personal challenge to make things more fun.

Like, how can I get my squats in today even though I’m in meetings all day? Welp, guess I’ll be making a few extra bathroom breaks.

It’s your health.

Start acting like you’re the one in control of it.

Exercise snacks are the answer to your sedentary lifestyle

My days no longer mean being confined to a cubicle with fluorescent lighting overhead, sucking away at my soul.

But I still use exercise snacks quite often.

Over the summer, my kids were home with me throughout the day for their vacation.

And I had to be creative with my exercise to make sure it happened. That’s where this concept shines.

I’d perform intermittent bouts of squats, push-ups and mobility.

When we went to a park or a playground, I’d find something to hang from (tree branches, monkey bars) to knock out some pull-ups.

I not only maintained muscle by being minimalist with this approach, but I also lost a few pounds in the process.

It works

If you’re interested, I actually have a free guide to this method of training using exercise snacks. And then we take it further with my microworkout options (you can read more about those here).

It’s the future of fitness for busy people like us and I think you’d enjoy it (also, it’s free).

Try it out for a few weeks and let me know if you start noticing a difference in how you feel.

I hope you found this useful. If so, I’d appreciate it if you sent this newsletter to one person you think would benefit from my writing today.

And if you’re new here and enjoyed this newsletter, I’d be honored if you subscribed for more at this link.

And as always, if you have any questions, please feel free to reach out.

I answer all of my emails at pete [at] petecataldo [.] com … Hit me up with the subject line “exercise snacks” and I’ll answer any questions you have to make this work for you.

Until next time,
Pete