No one’s going to fall out of their chair over the fact that sitting all day isn’t great for you. We’ve been told for years that it’s “the new smoking.” What’s less obvious is what to actually do about it, beyond the vague, guilt-inducing order to “move more.”
That’s the gap a new study in the British Journal of Sports Medicine set out to close. The researchers wanted to answer a practical question: Exactly how much movement is enough to counteract our sedentary lifestyles? “We’ve known for probably one to two decades now that sitting is bad,” says Keith Diaz, a certified exercise physiologist and an associate professor of behavioral medicine at Columbia University Medical Center, who led the work. “We wanted to come up with, ‘OK, what do we do about it?’ Give people a solution.”
Here’s what the researchers landed on: Get up and move for five minutes, once an hour, which Diaz calls a “movement snack.” The best part? You don’t even have to hit that target perfectly to notice a difference.
What happens when you take a break?
Instead of bringing people into a tightly controlled lab, Diaz’s team studied people in the real world. They studied more than 19,000 adults spanning a wide range of ages, jobs, and work environments, and asked them to take five-minute walking breaks every 30, 60, or 120 minutes. (Adults in wealthy countries sit for an average of 11 to 12 hours a day, which is most of your waking life.)
Diaz spent years running the controlled version of this experiment—the kind where he could order people onto a treadmill on a strict schedule. “In the lab, we can get perfect compliance,” he says. “Every half hour, every hour: ‘Get up, get on the treadmill, walk.’” Real life is messier. “People have lives, they’re working, there’s pressure,” he says. “They’re trying their best.”
The results were striking. Even though people managed only four to five breaks a day on average—well short of the hourly ideal—the average participant’s fatigue dropped by about 25%. “That’s a pretty big reduction,” Diaz says. “You’re gonna feel that difference at the end of your day.” People also reported feeling happier overall: bad moods declined, good moods increased, and the more movement breaks people took, the bigger the benefits were.
The findings also challenge the assumption that taking breaks will hurt productivity. Instead, people reported feeling more engaged in their work and more productive. “Counter to everybody’s concerns,” Diaz says, “this actually may help.”
How can a five-minute activity break do all that? Part of the answer is mechanical. Sit still for hours, and blood flow to your brain dips slightly, but your brain notices the shortfall of oxygen and reads it as tiredness. Moving gets things circulating again. There’s another benefit, too: what Diaz calls the “mood-muscle connection.” When you contract a muscle, it releases tiny chemicals that travel through your blood to your brain and help switch on feel-good hormones. “Our muscles are more than just the machinery that powers movement,” he says. “They have an important interplay with our brain in terms of how to regulate our mental health, our brain health.”
If every physical activity break helped, why crown 60 minutes the winner? Because the study was really a negotiation between two competing truths. “You have to balance two things,” Diaz says. “How effective is it, and how realistic is it for people to do?” Moving every 30 minutes actually delivered the biggest benefits—but people found it exhausting to keep up. Moving every two hours was a breeze to stick to, but the returns were less impressive. Sixty minutes landed in the sweet spot: manageable with meaningful results.
What kind of movement counts?
Here’s the good news, especially if the word “exercise” makes you want to lie down: The study participants were instructed to walk, but walking isn’t the magic ingredient—muscle contraction is. Simply standing isn’t enough, Diaz says, but there are plenty of other ways to get your muscles working. “I don’t think people should stress about what movement it needs to be,” he adds.
If you can leave your desk, take a lap: down the hallway, up the stairwell, around the block. If you can’t leave your desk, you can still get the same benefits without going anywhere. Diaz’s go-to no-gear routine is one minute of squats, one minute of high knees, and one minute of calf raises. “That’s all you need,” he says. “That has the same effects as if you went for a walk.” Under-desk pedals, mini ellipticals, and walking pads count too, if you’re up for splurging on equipment.
How often should you take a break? Think of the hourly target as a goal, not a commandment. “It’s just a guide, something to shoot for,” Diaz says. “I don’t think people should beat themselves up if they can’t get it.”
If you need a more realistic goal, he suggests aiming for five movement breaks a day. That’s roughly where the benefits begin to level off: Going from zero breaks to a few delivers the biggest payoff, while each additional break helps a little less than the one before it.
In other words, don’t let perfection get in the way. Even a handful of movement breaks is enough to make a real difference.
How to make it a habit
Knowing that you should move every hour and actually doing it are, as anyone with a gym membership can attest, two entirely different things. Diaz says the trick is to stop relying on willpower and start taking advantage of the cues you already have.
Think less like you’re scheduling another task, he suggests, and more like you’re brushing your teeth. “Nobody needs a reminder to brush their teeth,” he says—you do it because it’s tied to other habits, like getting dressed or heading to bed. Movement breaks can work the same way if you tether them to things that already happen on their own: finish a meeting, take a lap; send off a daily report, hit the stairwell. “Building those habits around task completion” is what eventually makes the whole thing automatic, he says, so you’re not white-knuckling your way to five walks a day.
Until your new routine is automatic, a nudge helps—just maybe not the one on your wrist. Diaz was surprised to learn that most participants ignored their smartwatch alerts in favor of a plain old phone timer. His reasoning is simple: “The Apple Watch and the Fitbits, they’re dumb reminders. They don’t know what you’re doing in your day,” he says. A watch will happily buzz mid-Zoom, when standing up is out of the question; a timer you set yourself only goes off when you’ve decided you’re free. He’s also outsourced the job to AI, asking his chatbot to occasionally prompt him to get up (and remind him why doing so is worth it).
His workday is full of little movement breaks. He regularly gets up, goes for a loop around his block, and then sits back down. For meetings where he’s mostly listening, he’s on a walking pad—at an easy pace. “At first I thought there’s no way I can work and walk at the same time,” he says, but the trick was keeping the speed down, to about 2 miles an hour. One movement break he never skips is after lunch: Moving after you eat blunts the blood-sugar spike and, he’s found, fends off the dreaded afternoon slump.
You don’t have to overhaul your life to feel better by the end of the workday. Just stand up, move for five minutes, and do it again when you can.
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