How often should you move your body?

Some kind of movement every 20 minutes is the sweet spot, a New Zealand study has found.

Taking a short break reduces blood sugar and insulin, and is particularly effective if done after eating, Dr Jen Gale, lead author in an AUT study told RNZ’s Saturday Morning.

“In the time after you eat a meal, all the goodness that you've eaten is digested and absorbed, and specifically the sugar from carbohydrate, that's the one that we're particularly interested in," she says.

Move that body!

Saturday Morning

Post-meal, the sugar from carbohydrate is floating around in our bloodstream, she explains.

“And if you're just sitting down, not doing anything, it's reliant on this hormone insulin to clear that blood sugar, to get that sugar that's in your bloodstream into your cells to be used as energy or to be stored later.”

Breaking up that sitting time, even with moderate activity, disrupts this, she says.

“That activity stimulates the glucose to be taken up into your cells via other pathways that don't necessarily rely on that hormone insulin.”

Activating the bigger muscles is key, Gale says.

“Like your quad muscles, your thigh muscles. And by doing that, the sugar in your blood is taken into the cell to help do that muscle contraction. So, you get the benefit of the insulin helping clear your blood sugar, but also that muscle activity clearing your blood sugar as well.

“By breaking it up and doing that little bit of activity, you're helping to reduce your blood sugar in that post meal period a little bit more quickly.”

The local research looked at night-time behaviour because that's when we tend to sit the longest and eat the most energy-dense food, Gale says.

“That means we're getting kind of the most energy, but also like sugar going into our system.

“And also, the hormone insulin that I was talking about earlier, naturally, it's just a little bit less active in the evening. It follows like a diurnal pattern, so slightly lower in the evening.”

These physiological mechanisms combined with behavioural patterns in the evening make it a high-risk time for the promotion of cardio-metabolic disease, she says.

So the same rules apply at night - get up and move - it doesn't need to be for long.

"We're not talking about doing like a big exercise session where you get really sweaty and you increase your heart rate heaps. It's very much a two-to-three-minute little activity break.

“... As simple as if you're sitting watching TV and you're able to stand up, just standing up on the spot, doing a couple of rounds of maybe some squats, some calf raises, some like leg swings.

“So those we call simple resistance exercises. But it doesn't have to be that strict - or you could have a dance around the living room.”

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