If you don’t have an hour to exercise each day, can you spare a minute or two?
This is the logic behind “exercise snacking”, a more accessible approach to keeping fit which can have an impressive positive impact on your health, according to new research.
Exercise snacks are bite-sized servings of exercise you can weave seamlessly into opportune moments throughout your day – think squats while the kettle boils or a few stretches at your desk. Each one usually takes between one and five minutes.
Doing this consistently has the power to improve cardiometabolic health, particularly in physically inactive people, according to a 2025 systematic review and meta-analysis published in the Scandinavian Journal of Medicine and Science in Sports.
Regular exercise snacking can improve your heart health, reducing your risk of cardiovascular disease, high blood pressure and high blood sugar levels.
Benefits of exercise snacking
The new study found that exercise snacking is particularly beneficial to physically inactive adults as it can be easily integrated into daily routines, offering a practical solution for those with limited time.
The study honed in on cardiometabolic health, but if you opt for resistance training exercises like squats and press-ups, you are likely to see an increase in strength and muscle. A short yoga flow or Pilates move may deliver stability and mobility perks, while aerobic activities like stair-climbing can set your cardiorespiratory fitness on an upward trajectory.
At 59, Olympic gold medal-winning hurdler Sally Gunnell uses exercise snacks both personally and with her fitness coaching clients as a way to “stay active when life is full-on”.
“Being consistent, even in small ways, is often more effective than sporadic intense sessions,” she says. “These small daily movements help keep muscles strong and joints moving freely. They improve posture and balance, boost circulation, improve your mood and build the confidence to move more.”
Another devotee of exercise snacking is Ben Carpenter, personal trainer and author of the best-selling book Everything Fat Loss.
“You can improve your health with very small bursts of exercise,” he says. “Exercise snacking is also very good for behaviour change – building a habit. You enjoy exercise more because you do it in small enough doses that you can complete it, rather than doing an hour-long workout and thinking, ‘That was hard, I won’t be doing that again’.”
Read more: The two-minute daily Pilates exercise that’s ‘great for posture, alignment and mobility’
How to create a successful exercise snack
As with any form of exercise, to be successful, exercise snacking workouts must be performed consistently.
One effective approach is to turn your chosen exercise snacks into a habit by stacking them on top of existing daily behaviours so you do them almost automatically. By removing the need to choose a time, place and type of exercise, and instead cueing it with another regular behaviour, you sidestep a phenomenon commonly referred to as “decision fatigue” and reduce the chances that you’ll skip the activity.
In his best-selling book Atomic Habits, the author and habit specialist James Clear says there are four pillars to successfully creating a habit; make it obvious, make it attractive, make it easy, make it satisfying.
If you are working from home, this could mean unrolling a yoga mat next to your desk at the start of the work day, then developing a consistent trigger for performing an equipment-free exercise. For example, you might do 10 press-ups every time you open your laptop or switch on your computer – the cue is obvious, and the exercise is easy to get into.
Alternative examples could be doing squats in the kitchen while the kettle boils, or doing high knees on the spot for 60 seconds after you brush your teeth.
Placing a calendar next to your chosen exercise spot and ticking off each completed workout could add a sense of satisfaction, and rewarding yourself at the end of a successful week with something you enjoy, such as a trip to the cinema, makes the act more attractive.
To encourage adherence, Clear also recommends keeping new habits to no more than two minutes at first. These can be built up over time, but it is important to start small and lay firm fitness foundations before graduating to longer bouts.
Two-minute workouts to boost heart health, strength and mobility
Each of these exercise snacking workouts has been linked to a “trigger” of a daily action you are guaranteed to do. When you do the trigger action, assign an exercise snack to immediately follow it.
You can also change the triggers or workouts.. The key to the success of this operation is finding a few short activities you can commit to doing multiple times each day, then making them second nature.
Exercise snack one
Trigger: Getting out of bed
Workout: Three Pilates roll downs (demonstrated in the video below)
Benefits: For most people, sleeping involves six-plus hours of minimal movement, so some extra motion can be helpful for getting the body going in the morning. The Pilates roll down is a “great reset for the spine”, says East of Eden fitness studio founder Abby McLachlan.
“It uses the abdominals to control the movement and it can help with back and neck tension,” she continues. “It’s a great exercise for posture and alignment too, which is why it’s often used in classes to start or finish the exercises.”
Exercise snack two
Trigger: Switching the kettle on
Workout: Squats (or sit-to-stands to a chair) until it boils
Benefits: This is one of Gunnell’s favourite cues. Squats, or sit-to-stands, recruit leg muscles including major players in your thighs such as the quadriceps. The squat is also a fundamental human movement pattern, so practising it regularly can help develop the strength and mobility needed to perform the movement with ease.
Exercise snack three
Trigger: When you open your laptop or turn on your computer
Workout: Two-minute AMRAP (as many rounds as possible) of the circuit below:
- Press-up (you can place your hands against a desk or wall to make it easier) x3
- Dead bug x6 (three repetitions each side)
- Glute bridge x9
Benefits: This quick circuit recruits muscles in your core, chest, shoulders, arms and posterior chain – the muscles running along the back of your body. As well as strengthening these areas, the faster pace of the circuit format can also raise your heart rate, leading to bonus cardio perks.
Exercise snack four
Trigger: When you close your laptop or turn off your computer
Workout: Go on a fast-paced five-minute walk outside
Benefits: A brisk pace ensures this walk falls under the “moderate-intensity activity” banner. “All of the research in this area suggests that most of the benefits [of walking] accumulate at a moderate or higher intensity,” says Dr Elroy Aguiar, an associate professor at the University of Alabama who specialises in walking and its impacts on health.
Benefits may include improvements to cardiovascular risk factors such as high blood sugar, high blood pressure and waist circumference.
Exercise snack five
Trigger: Picking up the TV remote
Workout: Complete superman pull-ups for 30 seconds. Do this twice, with 60 seconds of rest between sets.
Benefits: The muscles of the back can be strengthened with exercises like pull-ups and rows. However, they are much harder to hit without any equipment. The Superman pull-up is one of the few no-kit exercises to manage this, albeit to a lesser extent. It will also engage the glutes and the spine-stabilising erector spinae muscles in the core.
Exercise snack six
Trigger: When an advert comes on while watching TV
Workout: Pick two of flexibility expert Tom Merrick’s five favourite daily stretches – the 90/90, couch stretch, squat, hang and elephant walk – and hold each one for 30-60 seconds. You can find each move demonstrated in the video below.
Benefits: Most of us spend a lot of our time sitting down. Staying in one position for prolonged periods can lead to stiffness and soreness. Regularly accessing a range of positions can improve flexibility and mobility while countering the tightness experienced as a by-product of excessive sitting.
“For most people, the biggest benefit they’re going to get from [stretching to develop] flexibility is that feeling of losing restriction and gaining freedom to be able to move, even if that’s just bending over to pick something up or play with their kids,” Merrick says.
Exercise snack seven
Trigger: After brushing your teeth
Workout: Walk or run up and down the stairs for one to two minutes.
Benefits: One of the best ways to improve heart health and lung function is aerobic exercise – cyclical activities that raise the heart rate. That’s exactly what’s happening here, with the addition of an incline (the stairs) to increase the intensity of the activity. It might only be for a short spell, but, particularly for people who currently move very little, this small burst is likely to be enough to trigger positive fitness adaptations.
