At The Noakes Foundation, we’ve never been fans of snacking. If food is doing what it is supposed to do, meals should be sufficient. Hunger should have a rhythm, not a constant presence, and the need to snack every few hours often says more about what we are eating than about how often we should eat.
For many people who move toward a low-carbohydrate, high-fat way of eating, this becomes obvious quite quickly. Meals are more satiating, energy is more stable, and the habitual reach for something in between begins to fall away. What is often less discussed, however, is what happens to the moments that used to be filled with food. The mid-morning pause, the short break between tasks, these don’t disappear; they stop being defined by eating.
That shift opens up something more interesting than the question of whether or not to snack. It creates small, repeated opportunities within the day, and increasingly, these are being recognised as valuable in their own right. The idea of “exercise snacking” has emerged from this space, not as a replacement for structured exercise, but as a way of using these otherwise idle moments for brief, intentional movement. These are not workouts in the traditional sense, but short bursts of activity, often just a few minutes at a time, performed repeatedly across the day, using the time that already exists rather than trying to “make time”.
This matters because one of the most persistent barriers to physical activity is not a lack of awareness, but the perception that exercise requires a dedicated block of time. When movement is framed in that way, it competes with everything else in the day and is easily deprioritised (think work, cooking… sleep?). In contrast, accumulating activity in short bouts removes that barrier almost entirely. Exercise snacks are typically defined as bouts lasting five minutes or less, performed multiple times per day, and despite their simplicity, there is now a growing body of evidence showing that they can improve cardiorespiratory fitness, even when total exercise volume remains relatively low (Rodríguez et al., 2026).
What is particularly striking is that these benefits are being seen in people who are otherwise inactive, suggesting that it does not take a complete overhaul of someone’s routine to begin shifting their physiology in a meaningful way. Small, repeated bouts of effort, climbing stairs a few times a day, getting up from a chair with intention, walking briskly for a minute or two, start to accumulate, not just in terms of total movement, but in the signals they send to the body. In many ways, this reframes what we think of as “enough” when it comes to exercise, highlighting that the transition from doing very little to doing something, repeatedly, carries disproportionate benefit (Rodríguez et al., 2026).
It also aligns with a broader shift in how we understand movement in the context of modern life. Much of the day is now spent sitting, often in long, uninterrupted blocks, and this pattern appears to carry its own set of risks, independent of whether someone manages to fit in a single session of exercise later on. Breaking that pattern; even briefly, but regularly, introduces a very different rhythm, one that is more consistent with how the body is designed to function. In this context, exercise snacking is not just about adding movement, but about redistributing it across the day in a way that reduces prolonged inactivity (Bull et al., 2020).
What makes this particularly useful is how easily it fits into real life. These are not behaviours that require access to a gym, specialised equipment, or even a change of clothes. They are simply extensions of things people are already doing, taking the stairs instead of the lift, standing up and sitting down a few extra times, carrying something with a bit more intent, walking slightly faster than usual. The difference lies in doing them deliberately and doing them often enough for them to begin to matter, an approach that has also been described as accumulating activity through small, frequent “snacks” of movement across the day (Sanders et al., 2021).
None of this replaces structured exercise, and it is not intended to. There is still clear value in dedicated training for strength, fitness, and overall capacity. But for many people, particularly those who feel that exercise is something they never quite manage to prioritise, this offers a far more accessible entry point. It removes the need to “find time” and instead makes use of time that is already there.
On World Move for Health Day, this is perhaps a version of “snacking” that makes more sense to us. Not something you need in the way we’ve come to think about food, but something your day is already offering. A different way of using the moments that used to revolve around eating. Because those moments were never really the problem. It was simply how we learned to fill them. And if you are no longer filling them with food, they do not disappear; they become opportunities. Small, repeated, already part of your day. The only question is whether you take them?
And now that you’re thinking about it, maybe use the next one a little differently: stand up, move, even just a quick squat or ten.
References
Rodríguez, M. Á., Quintana-Cepedal, M., Cheval, B., Thøgersen-Ntoumani, C., Crespo, I., & Olmedillas, H. (2026). Effect of exercise snacks on fitness and cardiometabolic health in physically inactive individuals: Systematic review and meta-analysis. British Journal of Sports Medicine, 60, 133–141. https://doi.org/10.1136/bjsports-2025-110027
Bull, F. C., Al-Ansari, S. S., Biddle, S., et al. (2020). World Health Organization 2020 guidelines on physical activity and sedentary behaviour. British Journal of Sports Medicine, 54(24), 1451–1462. https://doi.org/10.1136/bjsports-2020-102955
Sanders, J. P., Biddle, S. J. H., Gokal, K., et al. (2021). Snacktivity to increase physical activity: Time to try something different? Preventive Medicine, 153, 106851. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ypmed.2021.106851
