When I first overheard someone talking about ‘Exercise Snacking’ I honestly thought they were referencing food!!

But turns out, I was wrong!

‘Exercise Snacking’ or ‘Active Snacking’ as I now like to call it, is surprisingly not a pre-workout treat 🤷‍♀️ but a creative way to make better use of your workout time – by choosing to exercise in the otherwise wasted minutes we have in our day.

Think 9 minute Ab Routines before you shower in the morning. A 15 minute walk around the block during your lunch break. Or a 19minute tone and flow class (@toneitup App) in the office before your last zoom call of the day.

Basically, ‘Active Snacking’ takes away the need for you to find a free hour every day to workout but instead makes use of any 10 or 12 or 15 minute break you have throughout your day to workout instead.

Great for those days when you don’t think you can get a workout in!

Now, ‘Active Snacking’ is not a new concept by any means, but it has increased in popularity in recent times as we make decisions around how we want our workout schedule to look in the future – post lockdown. Do we really want to return to the rigid schedule of trying to get to the gym every day on top of commuting back and forth to work again?

Or is the answer as simple as breaking our workout into bite size snacks we can do throughout the day?

For me, opting in for the shorter more time friendly workouts made perfect sense. I mean I already wear Activewear everywhere, so chances are I’m dressed for it! So the decision was easy!

My first step was to let go of the mindset that I needed an hour to do a workout. And when this clicked I literally started to see opportunities to workout in every 15minute break I had. And once I started to think this way finding the ‘time’ to exercise became so much easier.

I’m now 4 weeks in and I love it!!

I’ve been doing a mix of:

Yoga and meditation in the morning (which takes between 5-15minutes)

Some simple Booty Band and Ab exercises when watching TV (approx 5minutes per move)

And 1 or 2 x 20minute workouts using a combination of two App’s (Toneitup and Centr) that I do either before work, in my lunchbreak or after work.

I’m also wearing Activewear every single day now (instead of my usual 4-5 days) and have subsequently been doing more incidental exercise as well – with my Fitbit results increasing by at least 50% every day.

Moving forward my plan is to still do some longer workouts (2-3 days a week depending on my schedule) but change the majority of my exercise to ‘Active Snacking’ because I love that I have managed to gain an extra 4- 6hrs per week to do so many of the other things that I’ve be wanting to do but could never find the time.

So, if you want to join me and give it a go here’s a good way to start:

If you already have a fitness routine the easiest place to start is to break it down into smaller pieces. Say you normally do a bodyweight routine, simply break it down into pieces and do 3 reps of each exercise when you have some spare time throughout your day

To keep It interesting – feel free to mix in different body part exercises. Or do multiple exercises throughout the day for the same body part: One day can be upper body, the next legs, the next core, the next cardio.

Simply adapt your routine to your fitness goals and mix it up to keep it interesting and fun.

Here’s an example for you to try: