Discover how short, intense bursts of exercise can help you get in shape no matter how busy you are in this ultimate guide to exercise snacks and micro workouts

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As a stay at home parent with two young kids, my days were incredibly hectic.

There’s this approach from fit bro personal trainers (that clearly don’t have kids) shaming everyone to workout by telling us that “We all have the same 24 hours in a day.”

Cringe.

Yes, technically and scientifically, we clearly all only have 24 hours in which to complete a full rotation on this hellscape we call Earth.

But … 

My 24 hours with two younglings looks a hell of a lot different than your 24 hours of gym, tan, binge watch Joe Rogan episodes on YouTube.

When you are at home with multiple kids, every single minute is at a premium. 

If you are not currently entertaining the children, you’re planning ahead for the next minute when you’ll have to feed them their third or fourth breakfast (real ones know what I’m talking about).

If you can survive the constant feedings and nonstop interaction––and if your brain is not mush from communicating with not-quite-fully-formed humanoids for hours on end about Bluey––there’s still work to be done for yourself.

I’ve got a business that I was trying to build while both of my kids were home.

On top of that, I had to figure out how to lead by example and still prioritize my health and fitness.

The idea of a full workout session seems next to impossible on the busiest of stay at home parenting days. 

Especially if you need to commute to a gym or a class in order to do it. 

For many people, they end skipping the workout because they just don’t have the time (or energy). 

But, I’m here today to provide you with a simple solution using my minimalist principles that will finally allow you to exercise without spending an overwhelming amount of time to do it. 

If you want to skip ahead, I’ve created an easy-to-follow guide to exercise snacks and micro workouts where I provide two full days of options and the exercises to make this work for you. You can access that for free by clicking here.

Okay … now, let’s get into the meat of this stuff.

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The growing movement towards exercise snacks and micro workouts

Just like the name implies, it’s similar to how you snack with your eating … but this version is actually much healthier. 

Exercise snacking is performing short bursts of movement intermittently throughout the day (i.e., snacking on movement). 

These bouts of exercise can be as short as just one minute each. 

And yes, science shows that they are incredibly effective at improving cardiovascular, metabolic and overall health. 

There’s science to back up this premise and affirm that perhaps, this is the ideal way to move our bodies.

“A study published in January 2022 in the journal Exercise and Sport Sciences Review found that performing short bouts (1 minute or less) of vigorous exercise — which they referred to as “exercise snacks” — at intervals throughout the day was a “feasible, well-tolerated, and time-efficient approach” to improving heart and lung health and reducing the impact of a sedentary lifestyle on cardiometabolic health.”

This exercise snacking approach is a growing trend, especially for busy moms and dads who can’t find time to exercise. 

But I like to LevelUP this concept by applying principles of greasing the groove from strength coaches. 

We also add in a sprinkle of minimalist fitness.

The result is a workout approach that allows you to train anytime, anywhere, and do so with a limited time budget because you really only need to peel away from whatever you’re doing for a few minutes at a time.

It’s a more lifestyle-friendly approach to exercise. And it’s a practice I’ve been using on the busiest days of my parenting journey so I can stay in great shape and keep off the 50 pounds that I’ve lost.

I truly believe that exercise snacks and micro workouts are the future of fitness, but honestly, it’s very much like a call back to the Past, too. 

Your ancestors practiced exercise snacks and micro workouts every single day

Back in the days of the hunter-gatherer in the early periods of humanity, motivation to move was easy to come by. 

If you didn’t hunt and catch dinner, you simply did not eat. 

If you did not eat, you’d starve and die. 

We’ve evolved from the humans who understood this well and were able to hunt well enough to stay alive. 

The problem is that our modern world has an abundance of calories available to us. 

We no longer have to get up most days to find, chase, and kill our food, nor do we have to do the work of carrying that heavy load back home. 

The most heavy lifting you might have to do is carry a few groceries from your car trunk to your kitchen counter … a far stretch from when our ancestors were lugging dead animals for miles back to their camps and homes.

Purposeful exercise (a.k.a., working out) is a relatively new phenomenon. 

Our ancestors didn’t drive to the gym for a 45 minute sweat session. Because, they didn’t have to. They were active throughout their day, every single day of their lives.

When we look even closer, you can see that they performed essentially bodyweight movements throughout their day intermittently.

The closest modern-day comparison is the Hadza peoples of Tanzania, whose daily life looks strikingly close to those ancestors from thousands of years ago:

“Life for the Hadza is physically demanding. Each morning the women leave the grass huts of camp in small groups, some carrying infants on their back in a wrap, foraging for wild berries or other edibles. 

Wild tubers are a staple of the Hadza diet, and women can spend hours digging them out of the rocky ground with sticks. 

Men cover miles each day hunting with bows and arrows they make themselves. When game is scarce, they use simple hatchets to chop into tree limbs, often 40 feet up in the canopy, to harvest wild honey. 

Even the children contribute, hauling buckets of water back from the nearest watering hole, sometimes a mile or more from camp.

In the late afternoon, folks wend their way back to camp, sitting on the ground and talking around small cooking fires, sharing the day’s returns and tending to the kids.”

In other words, the Hadza get plenty of physical activity throughout the day. All of it happening in spurts (or exercise snacks):

• Walking.
• Digging.
• Climbing.
• Carrying heavy things.
• Sprinting to catch animals.
• Hauling firewood, jugs of water and the day’s catch back to camp.
• Processing the kill with skinning, chopping and cutting up the meat for food.

As a modern society, we’ve devolved into the sedentary blobs that we are today when in reality, we were meant to be moving, like the Hadza still do.

On the flip side, we’re also designed to be as efficient as possible to save and preserve energy (aka, calories). So whenever we have the option to rest and relax, we will absolutely take it.

In other words, since we don’t have to get up to catch and kill our food, we have no real motivating purpose to get up and move in the first place.

This is part of the reason why that 45 minute gym session sounds so damn daunting. 

Instead, let’s break that up.

What if you practiced short bouts of movement spread intermittently throughout the day?

In the morning, upon waking up, you perform some strenuous exercise for a few minutes to get the heart rate up. 

In the late morning, you do some strength movements. 

Before you eat lunch, you go for a long walk.

In the mid afternoon, another burst of strength to challenge your muscles. 

Before dinner, maybe some more fast-paced movement and then rounding out the activity for the day with something more slow-paced like a walk. 

This sort of intermittent exercise mimics the current lifestyle of the Hadza, and it’s very much like what our hunter-gatherer ancestors practiced daily. 

You’re getting tons of volume, but in spurts. At the end of the day, you might even be training for the full 45 minutes, but because you did five minutes here, five minutes there, it’s less daunting than doing all 45 minutes at once. 

Your body also gets to fully recover from the extended rest periods, so you’re not as gassed after each micro workout session as you would be if you went to some random fitness class.

Can you build muscle with exercise snacks and micro workouts? Why yes. Yes, indeed. 

It’s called greasing the groove, and it’s been a little known secret for building strength that was once thought of as a bit of an out-there philosophy for strength building.

But, it’s now becoming more mainstream as a way to maximize your gains in minimal time.

In simple terms, Greasing the Groove is just submaximal training done to really good form and performed at multiple intervals throughout your day. 

Submaximal means you are not taking the movement pattern to total failure. In fact, you are only going about halfway to your failure point. 

The “grease the groove” method was popularized by Pavel Tsatsouline in the early-2000s. 

Pavel, a Russian kettlebell expert and world-renowned strength coach, summarized the method as “training as often as possible while remaining as fresh as possible.”

You’re essentially practicing the push-up and the pull-up rather than trying to max out your reps.

Because it is done submaximally, there’s also a much lower risk for injury, especially with the bodyweight basic approach like I preach in my coaching programs.

And since you are taking longer breaks for recovery (like 60+ minutes in many cases), you are fully rested before your next set.

Let’s count all of the ways in which exercise snacks and micro workouts will be your new best fitness friend.

The pros of exercise snacks and micro workouts

Time is no longer a factor; no more 45-minute workout with a 30-minute commute each way.

It’s much easier to pop up from your couch and knock out a round of squats at 7:45 a.m. than it is to dress up, lace up and head up to your gym. 

There’s a metabolic advantage to intermittent exercise that breaks up all that sitting you’ve been doing all day long.

It’s a more natural way to treat physical activity and reflects more accurately what the human body was meant to do (move, rest, move, rest, etc.).

Extra rest time in between your actual working sets allows for full recovery. This means you can bring maximum intensity to each round of exercise because you are well-rested.

Additional benefits include:

Cardiovascular health: Exercise snacks can improve cardiorespiratory fitness and cardiovascular function. They can also help reduce the negative effects of prolonged sitting on cardiometabolic health.

Strength and endurance: Short bursts of exercise can increase strength and endurance by pushing your heart, lungs, and muscles beyond normal levels.

Metabolic health: Exercise snacks can improve metabolic health and burn extra calories. Your metabolism will also continue to burn extra calories after the exercise burst due to an increased metabolic rate.

Mood: Exercise snacks can also boost your mood with an endorphin rush.

Blood sugar: Exercise snacks can reduce blood sugar levels.

Here’s how to set up your exercise snacks and micro workouts

Let’s break it down and simplify it for you so you can take action. 

To make this as effective as possible, we’re going to create a definition for exercise snacks as cardiovascular movements versus micro workouts which are more in line with the strength-based, grease the groove approach.

You’re going to utilize both methodologies to find success. 

The exercise snacking variety is simple: Just make sure that whatever exercise you are choosing is performed vigorously. 

And how do we define “vigorous” exercise? Researchers simply stated that you’ll be fine as long as you are unable to “say more than a few words without pausing for a breath.”

Some examples:

• Run up/down a flight of stairs
• Jumping jacks
• Run in place
• High rep bodyweight squats
• Squat jumps
• Burpees
• Dancing with your kids
• Vigorous consensual sex (if your partner is down with that)

Start with two to three intervals to your day and see if you can work up to maybe four or five over time. The study I mentioned above only required one to two minutes of exertion; just enough to get the heart rate up without it being terribly taxing or breaking much of a sweat.

It’s a great way to break up all that damn sitting you’re doing all damn day long.

But, cardio exercise alone won’t just cut it for your overall physical health. We must get stronger. Therefore, you’re also going to incorporate the micro workout approach to your day.

To get started with this grease the groove philosophy to training, I like the accessibility of bodyweight movements. 

There’s less injury risk as opposed to having you just get set up with some kind of weighted activity.

You can perform bodyweight movements just about any time, anywhere. 

At its core, you must look to the natural movement patterns of a human to ensure we are hitting all of the proper notes for micro workouts to be effective. 

As humans, we have a few core functions:

• we push things away from us;
• we pull things towards us;
• we pick things up by hinging at the hips;
• we squat down;
• we lunge;
• we walk;
• we carry things.

As long as you are hitting those movements in your day to day, you are doing everything needed to properly challenge and stimulate your muscles.

And this gets even simpler to do when you embrace my minimalist workout concept. Make sure you catch up with that in this article.

The premise being that you’ll pick one variation of each movement per workout:

• A pulling motion (pull-ups, chin-ups, and rows)
• A pushing motion (push-ups, pike push-ups, dips)
• A lower body exercise (squats, lunges, hip hinges)

So now you can take your daily micro workout setup and mimic this minimalist framework to marry the best of both worlds.

Let me give you an example of how I make this work.

How I use micro workouts to stay fit on a tight schedule

Over the summer, my family made the quick trip from NYC to Philly to see some family for the Fourth of July holiday. I didn’t have time to crank out a full workout routine, so I space out my training using micro workouts.

To start the morning, while we were finishing up the packing and getting the kids ready to go, I set up my doorframe pull-up bar. 

Two sets for warm up in between sips of coffee and setting up breakfast for the kids. 

Then I executed three sets throughout the morning of standard pull-ups:

• One set after helping my son brush his teeth. 
• Another set while my daughter got her hair ready for the day. 
• A third set just as I zipped up my bags to get going.

The trip was a fairly quick drive. Just a couple of hours down the New Jersey Turnpike into Philly. When we arrived at our destination, I took a few minutes to warm-up for my next set of micro workouts: push-ups

• Just a few standard reps to warm-up and maybe a little wrist and elbow mobility. 
• From there, I knocked out three more sets of push-ups. 
• I elevated my feet to increase the resistance and focused on good, solid, clean form with a goal of making every push-up picture perfect. Three sets. 

Then I enjoyed a late lunch with my family.

After hanging out with my in-laws and catching up, it was time to get ready for burgers and hot dogs on the grill before we settled in to watch some of the fireworks for the Fourth. 

Before doing so, I executed my third and final microworkout of the day: bodyweight squats. 

• A quick warm-up set of just a few squats, followed by some high knees and jumping jacks just to get the blood pumping and then I got into it. 
• Three sets of 50+ reps (I think I hit 70 on this day). And then I was done.

By the way: I love high rep bodyweight squats for mobility and conditioning gains. They can also improve some strength, as well. 

To refresh: I did three total sets each of pull-ups, push-ups and squats. 

Each round took maybe 5-10 minutes total time, tops (including my quick warm-ups). 

Altogether that would be about a 30-minute workout. 

But, stealing five minutes here, 10 minutes there never really interrupted the day and was much more doable. 

I didn’t have to be rude and step away from my family to get my fitness in for the day. It was just small little snacks of movement that allowed me to keep my volume going. 

Make it a game.

See how many points you can wrack up at the end of the day.

Each movement you do is 10 points. See if you can get to 100 points by the end of the day.

Just get creative with ways you can move more frequently. All of it counts.

• Take the stairs instead of the elevator.
• Park farther away so you can get a few extra steps in.
• Carry your groceries farther instead of using a cart.
• Use a hand mixer instead of your electric.
• Wash the dishes by hand instead of using your dishwasher.

Every night at the end of dinner, we turn up the music and dance as a family for a few minutes to our favorite songs.

It’s an exercise snack, a burst of cardiovascular activity and it gets the kids up and physically active, too. But … it’s also fun. #LeadByExample

Get up and move. Humans are designed to be moving in spurts throughout the day. 

And moving more intentionally with exercise snacks and micro workouts is the key to unlocking strength and cardio gains you’ve never thought possible with a tight time budget. 

I guarantee you’ll appreciate the flexibility of exercise snacks and micro workouts on your busiest of days

Try this out for a few days or weeks and let me know how you’re getting on. It’s the future of fitness for busy parents and professionals that want to get in shape without the time-suck of traditional workout sessions.

To help you get started, I’ve created an entire guide to micro workouts for you that is totally free.

The “Too Busy to Workout Solution” covers everything we went over here today, but then I crafted two days worth of exercise snacks and micro workouts that you can implement into your schedule.

You can download that by clicking here.

I hope you enjoyed this newsletter. As always, if you have any questions, please feel free to reach out. 

If you’re interested in working with me to get a complete body transformation program that couples minimalist training with a personalized approach to nutrition (no calorie counting here), then you should check out my Lean4Life Coaching Program.

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

Until next time,
Pete