"From walking up the stairs to speedily mopping the floors; in recent years we've come to understand that it is not just structured exercise that is good for our health, but we know very little about how these short bouts of incidental activity translate to health benefits," said the study's senior author Professor Emmanuel Stamatakis from the University of Sydney's Charles Perkins Centre.
They used wrist-worn wearables data from the UK Biobank and machine learning to analyse the seven-day incidental physical activity patterns of 25, 241 UK adults aged 42 to 78, down to a 10-second time window. They then linked these physical activity micropatterns with participants' health records, following them for close to eight years to identify how length and intensity of physical activity bouts were linked to health status.
97% of incidental physical activity was accrued in bouts lasting <10 minutes Short bouts of <10 minutes at a moderate to vigorous intensity were associated with a steep decrease in major cardiac events (heart attack/stroke) and death by any cause. Moving consistently for at least 1 to 3 minutes was associated with significantly more benefit (29% lower) than very short bouts <1 minute. The longer the bouts the better (e.g., accrued in 2 minutes vs 30 seconds), regardless of
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