Running sandhills should be limited to nostalgic ARL ads backed by a Tina Turner anthem or NRL players sweating out another pre-season.
Outside of that, if you just want to be healthy, why?
In 2020, Australians went all-in on buying fitness equipment but missed out on one of the easiest ways to keep moving: incidental exercise.
With working from home arrangements increasingly being employed across Australia, Aussies are missing out on the benefits of walking to public transport, climbing the stairs to work or going the extra block to avoid the barista who treats the frothing jug like a burning witches cauldron.
Instead, it’s a small commute to the WFH set-up and 10 hours of the type of inactivity that is killing you.
In news that’ll shock no one, 35 per cent of us gained significant weight since the start of the pandemic while Australia as a whole managed to claim gold medal in increased alcohol consumption.
It doesn’t have to be this way, though.
The concept of snackable exercise – basically, short bursts of exercise throughout the day – hit the mainstream in late 2019 – just in time for most of the world to commence sitting down for large parts of the day while working if they’re lucky.
It was the perfect time, but the message never stuck
To borrow some rugby league pre-season parlance, you don’t have to train the house down to look good naked, live a healthier life and shake off the head noise that can creep in from working from home.
Just do less exercise, more. Even if a marathon, sweat-soaked session seems the only forward, it’s not.
“I’m a big believer these days that it’s not about exercise; it’s about movement,” 16-year NRL veteran and Man Shake founder Adam MacDougall told Sporting News.
“When you look at exercise in its practical sense, you’re going to the gym for an hour but what’s one hour in a day if you’re sitting down for the rest of it.”
The dangers of sitting all day are nothing to sneeze at: a 2020 study published in the British Journal of Sports Medicine revealed just what’s happening to our bodies when we get lost in the day-to-day grind of a sedentary job.
It’s isn’t pretty: “A high daily tally of sedentary time (defined in this study as 10 or more hours) is linked to a significantly heightened risk of death, particularly among people who are physically inactive,” the study warns.
Great. However, the effect is substantially weakened with 30-40 minutes of daily vigorous exercise.
Enter snackable exercise.
Here's how it works: set your fitness tracker, watch, oven timer or whatever’s available to go off every hour. When the alarm goes off, you’ve got five minutes of exercises – which YouTube has a myriad of options – to get through.
And then you’re back into it. No missed meetings, emails or deliveries of ill-thought out online shopping.
Weird in the office? Probably. But at home it’s just you – and possibly some slightly baffled roommates.
“It doesn’t have to be strenuous; it can be a weakness you want to work on,” MacDougall said. “Every hour you can get up and stretch or hit a core strength exercise.
“The human body wasn’t designed to move in one big burst throughout the day and then sit idle throughout the day. It's the law of dimishining returns: you get most of the benefit from the beginning of doing something and then the benefit tapers off.”
In other words, a 30-minute walk has less benefits than three, 10-minute walks, particularly around meals or after meals.
“Research has shown that one of the better ways to manage your blood sugar levels is to bookend eating with some type of activity,” MacDougall said.
“It helps convert it into fuel rather than landing on your backside or gut.”
There’s another consideration to consider: each day, no matter how much like you feel like you’re on, your body is smarter than you.
“When I went to the gym over the Christmas period, which I don’t usually do, I found that I was compensating for the rest of the day by hardly moving,” MacDougall said.
“I ended up burning significantly less calories and moving a lot less because my body was smart enough to realise that I've done some really hard exercise, so now I'm going to conserve energy.”
It’s the advice doctors, personal trainers and rugby league coaches alike preach: consistency. One massive session never beats five days of doing what you can around your work day and other commitments.
In 2021, when time will likely have that same 2020 trick of refusing to move and simultaneously fly by, find five minutes, every hour, for you.
Adam MacDougall is a former representative rugby league player and is the creator of The Man Shake - a healthy shake that has transformed the lives of hundreds and thousands of Aussie men.
