Dynamic Dialogue with Danny Matranga - 387: The Power of Exercise Snacks

Episode Date: October 2, 2024

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Hey everybody, welcome in to another episode of the Dynamic Dialogue Podcast. As always, I'm your host, Danny Matrenga. And in this episode, episode 387, I'm going to be talking about one of my new kind of favorite things in the fitness space. And that is what many people are now calling exercise snacks. These are just small bouts of exercise. And when I say small, I mean small in both duration and output, they are supposed to be short.

They can be super effective for helping you get in shape. And I'm gonna share exactly how it is. I would recommend you use, your friends use, your family use exercise snacks to get in shape, stay in shape, and frankly, lower the barrier for fitness so that more people or lower the barrier to fitness so that we can help more people get in shape. All right guys, enjoy the episode.

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Okay, folks. So getting into what I think is a really cool, exciting topic, and that is of course exercise snacks. We alluded to exercise snacks in the introduction to the podcast, but exercise snacks have become more popular, not only with the general population, but also just jargon wise in the fitness space. You're hearing people reference them more. You're seeing them in the academic space being studied. I have studies here that I've pulled specific to exercise snacks or short bout exercise from one, two, three, four, five, six, seven studies. We have seven studies, which I think is kind of cool. In addition to those seven studies, they're going back as far as eight years. So we can see the utilization of an exercise snack in

the literature improving health as far back as 2014. So 10 years, but it's really kind of catching fire more recently. I think they're fantastic recommendations. I have heard these postulated by many fitness fanatics in the past. I think of the rich piano feeder workouts, but these are just short workouts guys. They're just short workouts. Ideally they're challenging, but it's all relative. It could be challenging aerobically, anaerobically,

whatever, but the point is we're breaking exercise down into a snack rather than making it a full meal. So, an exercise snack is, in definition, a short burst of physical activity throughout the day that is an alternative to a longer traditional workout. So instead of having one big exercise, quote unquote, meal, perhaps throughout the day you could have several small albeit effective exercise snacks. Now let me put this in my in the context of my life and how this could work. So let let's say I go to work, and this is true,

I usually head into the studio by six in the morning. So, let's say between five and six in the morning I have no time for a quote unquote full workout, but I do have 15 minutes. What if I did 15 minutes of arm supersets, and that counts as my resistance training snack. And so what I do is 30 seconds of curls, followed by 30 seconds of tricep extensions, followed by 30 seconds of rest, first six or seven rounds to complete the 15 minutes and get

a nice pump in my arms training close to failure. That takes 15 minutes. I could do that at home. I could do something like hammer curls and overhead dumbbell extensions, just having dumbbells. Now, from this, I'm going to move through my work day and I'm not off until two. But from two to 2.30, I have some time to kill.

And maybe from two to 2.30, I go on a walk and I have my second snack. And that snack is a 30 minute aerobic walk, a brisk walk. And I go through my day, I get home, pretty busy with things until seven or eight o'clock, at which point I wind down with my wife. And maybe during an hour's worth of television, I can sneak in a 15-minute

mobility session. Now, just to put this in perspective, that's a 24-hour day, and I did 15 minutes of lifting in the morning, 30 minutes of walking in the afternoon, and 15 minutes of mobility while watching TV in the evening. That combination of exercise snacks, three types from three different categories, all of a sudden led to one hour of exercise. And it's probably the case that to truly maximize my fitness and my potential and my physique and my performance, that this strategy just won't work. But if you want to get in better shape, build a little muscle, and improve multiple different elements

of your health and wellbeing, exercise snacking clearly works. And I want you to take a second to think, the people that are in my life, the people that I care about, maybe I'm one of these people who don't engage with exercise as much as they probably should or I think they should. Would those people, would you be receptive

to breaking it into 10 to 20 minute intervals that you spaced across the day in three to four different chunks? You don't need a ton of equipment. In fact, it could all be body weight. You could argue that it could, would benefit almost everybody to just do the aerobic, anaerobic, or mobility recommendation type things I lined out just on their own.

But if you did a three tiered approach where you did 10 to 50 minutes of mobility, 10 to 50 minutes of lifting, 10 to 50 minutes of cardio, you'd look, move, and feel way better in a very 15 minutes of mobility, 10 to 15 minutes of lifting, 10 to 15 minutes of cardio, you'd look, move, and feel way better in a very short amount of time, even with just kind of dusting these in as exercise snacks.

But something I want to specifically talk about today are the health benefits associated with short duration exercise. And one study from 2022 examined how brief exercise snacks can significantly improve cardio metabolic health. Researchers had exercise bouts lasting two to three minutes. And these bouts showed enhanced insulin sensitivity, better blood glucose levels, then baseline, and even on a minute per minute basis, shorter duration exercise did really well

compared to longer term exercise in terms of managing blood glucose and managing cardio metabolic health. Another study from 2014 looking specifically at insulin resistance and placing an exercise snack before meals showed that these exercise snacks can be tremendously beneficial for reducing what we call postprandial blood glucose, which basically just means a little bit of exercise before was shown to really decrease insulin activity spiking post meal.

So a really powerful tool for people who might be at risk for type 2 diabetes. Really great option for anyone looking to manage their blood sugar levels. Now I've talked about on the podcast many times about my desire to get moving after a meal and how I like a post meal walk for many of the same reasons. But I would say this is without a doubt the best way you could do it if you wanted to truly have the lowest effect on your blood sugar possible with each meal. Doing some exercise before, not only do we see it here in the research, but I'll say it anecdotally,

can make a really big difference. What's going on, guys? Taking a break from this episode to tell you a little bit about my coaching company, Core Coaching Method. More specifically, our app-based training. We partnered with Train Heroic to bring app-based training to you

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days. Just click the link in the podcast description below. Can't wait to see you in the podcast description below. Can't wait to see you in the core coaching collective, my app based training community back to the show. Something else that I thought was cool from a 2019 study, by the way, the first study was from 2022. That was from a lab with Gabala and Little. Second study I just referenced was from Francois, 2014. This one is from Jenkins, 2019. And this study looked at stair climbing, specifically. Short bouts of stair climbing.

And what can going up the stairs a few times a day or just for a few minutes do to improve our heart health? And it is the case that we can see improved cardiorespiratory fitness markers, even with short bouts of stair climbing. So what I want you to think about here is, you know, we all probably could just find time to go for a hilly walk or walk bleachers

Not necessarily running not necessarily sprinting not necessarily a crazy cardio program This could be a treadmill on a slight incline. We're literally just talking about taking stairs stair master guys just stairs Alone no equipment needed incredibly effective and improving aerobic capacity, aerobic fitness, key markers of aerobic fitness. I think that's important. I think when I see, man, very little input, exceptionally high output, I think to myself, that's cool, I wanna recommend this. And when it comes to exercise,

I'm always looking to get as many people as I reasonably can into it, as many people as I reasonably can doing it. And I find that a huge barrier I run into as a coach is time, time availability, especially when it comes to people who have kids and people who have busy lives. And the cool thing about exercise snacks

is you can really kind of fit them in almost anywhere you want, where it's practical. I mean, look, maybe you can't sneak dumbbells into the office and like bang out lateral raises at your desk, but you know, we're talking about 10 to 20 minute intervals that maybe you can sprinkle in before work, after work, when you wake up, before bed, that can make a difference. And I would also go so far as to say they don't just improve these baseline fitness

things we're talking about, whether it's cardio metabolic factors, insulin sensitivity, etc. Probably going to have better gains, probably going to feel a little better, probably going to move a hell of a lot better just from doing some exercise snacks. So here's how I would kind of put this into your life. If you wanted to use exercise snacks or you're a fit person who's like, hey, no excuses guys, let's at least exercise snack. You know, you might be setting some standards in your household with your kids around exercising and maybe you're like, okay, you got to do some snacks today, guys. You can't just sit around and play video games. Or you want to encourage a loved one and say, hey, have you heard of exercise snacking?

I know you're busy, but it's a great way to kind of break it up. I think this could be a really great tool to get more people doing something super important. So first tip, try to do it daily or recommend doing it daily. I think the more frequently you do something, the more likely it is to stick or become a habit. And because exercise snacking has such a low time investment, like literally as few as 10 to 20 minutes a day, guys, multiple bouts of course is better here.

More is always better in this context, for the most part, assuming you don't go totally off the rails and just do it like, you know, every hour. But a point being, a little bit goes a tremendously long way and the daily integration, perhaps even the multiple time a day integration of an exercise snack, is going to fast track getting into the habit of exercising. And that's really cool because if you were going to the gym every day for an hour and you were a total novice, I'd say, dude, you're going to be so sore. You're probably not making full. You're probably not fully recovering.

You're probably missing out a little bit. You'd almost be better off doing a little less. The likelihood of overtraining or overshooting with exercise snacks is extremely low and very encouraging. So we want to deploy them frequently. And I would say at the very least, you need to commit to doing this daily for at least 20 minutes if you're going to deploy

this tactic. Now, again, the more you do it, the more effective it'll be, the better the adaptations you'll get, and the more you'll ingrain the habit of regular exercise, which is kind of the whole point. However, I don't think it's reasonable to assume anybody can just put a habit into place and go days and days and days and days and days

without breaking it. So if you miss a day, no big deal. Just don't miss two in a row. Okay. Another thing I like to think about with these is just how accessible they are. This is something that again, you don't need equipment for. You could just do the cardio component, just do the mobility component, just do calisthenics, just grab a couple dumbbells and do like lightweight resistance training. The thing is we want to regularly and consistently move the body in a way that challenges us. If you do stairs you're gonna get some carryover to your muscles in your lower body. If

you do mobility you'll have some carryover to your muscles. If you lift weights you'll have some carryover to your mobility and to your cardiovascular system. There's always a little cross pollination but the accessibility of just being able to like pick one thing and go for only 10 to 15 minutes, 20 at the high end, is a really big deal in a world where people feel very time poor, which is a kind of unique way of saying they don't have the resource that is time to allocate to exercise. They're not stupid, like they're very aware that they would benefit from exercise That's why things to me and my this is just my opinion

But that's why things like exercise snacking are so cool because they present a unique solution To a long-held issue that a lot of people face which is the belief They don't have time to exercise and I think that breaking the paradigm that all your exercise needs to be done in one bow is silly. You know, I'm not recommending double days for anybody, but as a younger athlete, I was able to do morning resistance training, an afternoon speed sport-specific or skill training, two separate sessions.

Of course course it is absolutely the case that over time I Have gotten a little older and a little wiser and I don't do this anymore and I wouldn't recommend it But I was doing a lot of training across two sessions and adapting and while it's impractical to do two long sessions a day and tremendously arduous, it's very easy to commit to two to three small sessions a day, especially if they are different in their theme. It was very intellectually easy to not burn out on a morning lift because I didn't have another evening lift.

I had an evening skill session, speed session, conditioning session, right? They were different. And if you want to snack on different things, that could work very well. But if you were most focused on your physique, what if you said, okay, today is a quote unquote push day, and I'm doing chest press with thumbbell,

or I'm going to do pushups with thumbbells, and shoulder press, my compound lifts in the morning. And I'm gonna do, you know, just 20 minutes worth. Then in the middle of the day, I'm gonna do a bunch of shoulder raises, laterals, fronts, Y raises, four sets of 12 reps of 20 minutes. There's your accessory work for your delts. And then you're going to finish with some skull crushers and close grip pushups for the triceps and the chest. And you're like, okay, I did a little bit of work in the morning, a little bit of work in the afternoon, a little bit of work in the evening.

And if I add it all up, it kind of looks like in the hour and a half workout I would have done at the gym. I just spread it out. You know what, folks? I don't know how much worse that would really be for your gains than doing it all at once. You might not hit the high end numbers. You might have some lethargy to fight through. But if you use submaximal load and you use failure as a proxy for success of the set, I think you could get some places with just splitting that workout into thirds and doing it when you can. Now, that probably assumes you have equipment at home.

Of course, to take full advantage of this, you probably have a home gym. But all things being equal, you can spread this around different adaptations, take advantage of where you're at. Hey, body weight in the morning at home, walk at lunch at work, mobility in front of the TV at night, all kinds of different ways to do it. So I hope you guys enjoy this episode on exercise snacks, my thoughts on exercise

snacks. I'm very bullish on them. I think they are very, very cool. Again, I want to urge you guys to try different types of exercise, find out what works best for you. I want to emphasize that it is super, super key to be consistent. That's probably the most important thing. And I think these small chunks are really easy to stick to and get in a rhythm with. You can do them a couple of times a day.

And that's one of the best damn ways you can ever go about building a habit. So if you enjoyed this episode, share it with somebody who might benefit from implementing exercise snacks. Tag me, share it to your Instagram story so I can say thank you, and leave the show a five star rating and review on Apple Podcasts. It helps the show rise in the rankings, helps more people find it, and the same is true for Spotify.

Catch you on the next one.