From running up stairs, to rigorous gardening: these everyday activities could boost your health and help you live longer.
Everyone knows that the key to a healthy long life is to exercise and eat well. But what if you simply don’t have the time to slog it out at the gym, or chalk up 10,000 steps a day? The good news is that doing everyday activities with more rigour and energy can achieve huge benefits. Think running up the stairs, power walking around the house, or playing with your children or pets.
If you’ve followed exercise science in the last three years, you might have encountered a new term: vigorous intermittent lifestyle physical activity or VILPA. Also described through the various monikers of “exercise snacking,” “snacktivity,” or “activity microbursts,” it’s the latest solution to a long-term problem – how best to coax the most reluctant of exercisers to sit less and move more?
In the past decade, high-intensity interval training (HIIT) – which involves pushing the body to its limits through brief explosive bursts of running, cycling and bodyweight exercises like squats or jumping jacks – has become a popular workout for more time-pressed gym goers. It has also been shown to improve blood sugar control, cholesterol, blood pressure and body fat.
According to Mark Hamer, professor of sport and exercise medicine at University College London, VILPA is a scaled down form of HIIT. It simply means doing everyday activities with slightly more gusto with the aim of raising your heart rate for one or two minutes at a time.
Hamer explains that the idea of VILPA first arose when he and his colleagues were analysing movement data collected by fitting wrist worn wearables to people who did no formal exercise. The scientists noticed that, despite not playing sport or hitting the gym, some individuals were managing considerable amounts of movement simply by going about their daily lives. This ranged from fast bursts of walking while commuting to work, to going up stairs. “Much of this movement was accrued in very short chunks,” says Hamer. “This led to this concept of microbursts.”
To their surprise, Hamer and colleagues discovered that these microbursts of movement were linked to health benefits. In a 2022 study, using data from 25,241 people across the UK, Hamer and scientists at the University of Sydney found that just three or four one-minute bouts of VILPA each day was sufficient to provide a 40% reduction in the risk of premature death from all causes, and a 49% reduction in risk of death from cardiovascular disease, compared with people who did little movement at all. A more recent study also concluded that just over four minutes of VILPA each day can offset some of the risks of a sedentary lifestyle for heart health.
“Through doing their daily activities in brief bursts of higher intensity, several times throughout the day, people can still attain health benefits to lower their risk of chronic diseases,” says Matthew Ahmadi, a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Sydney. “It [VILPA] can also help stave off frailty which becomes very important as we age.”
Ahmadi describes these findings as especially exciting, because research shows that the majority of UK adults over the age of 40 do not take part in regular exercise or sport, often due to time constraints or other barriers. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), this reflects a worrying global trend where nearly 1.8 billion adults are at risk of disease because they don’t do enough physical activity.
“We all know that physical activity is good for our health but many of us are not active enough,” says Amanda Daley, professor of behavioural medicine at Loughborough University in the UK. “There are lots of reasons, with the most common one being not having enough time. The micro exercise [or VILPA] approach to physical activity only requires a few minutes of people’s time, a few times a day over a week, making it very easy, accessible and inexpensive.”
What VILPA shows is that simply tweaking your day so that you run for the bus, power walk around the house when doing errands, or carry out the housework or gardening with a bit more energy can make a significant difference when it comes to improving your health. These are all everyday examples of VILPA, as is playing high-energy games with your children and pets. “We have different opportunities to engage in moderate to vigorous activity and it doesn’t necessarily have to be through [formal] exercise or specialised gym equipment,” says Ahmadi. “If you’re going for a walk, mixing in brief bursts of fast-paced walking can be an easy way to accrue VILPA.”
Surveys show that people respond positively to the idea, as it highlights the benefits of activities which they may not previously have considered to be health-boosting. Researchers like Ahmadi and Shigenori Ito, a cardiologist at Sankuro Hospital in Japan, say that the VILPA concept can even be used as a way of improving strength through activities such as carrying heavy shopping bags each day, or working the leg muscles and joints by briskly climbing a flight of stairs.
The idea of activity microbursts fits neatly into a new doctrine which exercise researchers are keen to encourage – when it comes to physical activity, doing anything is better than nothing.
For instance, according to the NCD Alliance, an organisation which aims to address the steady rise of non-communicable or chronic diseases around the world, up to five million deaths per year could be averted if more of us were sufficiently active. “Globally, our lifestyles are becoming much more sedentary,” says Katie Dain, chief executive of the NCD Alliance. “To put it bluntly, more of us are sitting in the office, while many of our cities are more designed for cars than humans.”
Addressing this is not easy. Japan for example, is becoming an increasingly sedentary nation, and even hosting the Tokyo 2020 Olympics has seemingly made little difference, which is a concern for doctors like Ito. “Being sedentary is one of the key cardiovascular risk factors, along with hypertension, smoking, and diabetes,” he says.
