Welcome to a series I’m beginning, on a consistent basis I'll send you one idea about your health and wellness, grounded in real research, written for people who don't have all day.
Here's where I want to start.
In 2019, Martin Gibala, an exercise physiologist at McMaster University, set out to answer a slightly absurd question: what happens to sedentary office workers when you ask them to do almost nothing? Not nothing in the colloquial sense. Nothing in the literal sense of "less than a minute of exercise per day."
He brought them into the lab and asked them to sprint up three flights of stairs. As fast as they could, safely. Then walk it off. They'd repeat this two more times across the day, with a few hours in between. Total time on task: under 60 seconds.
After six weeks, their cardiorespiratory fitness, which is the single strongest predictor of how long you'll live, had measurably improved. No gym membership. No Lululemon. No 6 a.m. alarm.
Gibala calls these "exercise snacks." The label is cute but the mechanism is serious. Brief, intense bursts of effort trigger many of the same adaptations in your heart, lungs, and mitochondria as a long cardio session. Your body, it turns out, doesn't audit whether you stitched the work together in one block or scattered it across a Tuesday.
What this means is that the thing keeping most people from being meaningfully fitter isn't time. It's a belief, picked up somewhere along the way, that anything less than half an hour "doesn't count."
It counts. The data is unambiguous on this.
Three ways to use this today, if you're starting from somewhere near zero:
Find the nearest staircase and climb it as fast as is safely possible. Walk it off. Do this twice more before dinner. That's your workout.
Every time you walk through your kitchen, do ten bodyweight exercises. By the time you go to bed, you'll have done more than most people do in a week.
Before your next call, spend 30 seconds doing something that gets you breathing hard. Push-ups, jumping jacks, mountain climbers, whatever's in reach. Two of these a day stacks up faster than you'd guess.
The point of all of this isn't that an hour at the gym is bad. It's that the case for doing nothing because you don't have an hour has just collapsed.
Try one snack today. Reply and tell me how it went. I read everything.
Until next time,
Justin W.