One of the most popular New Year’s resolutions is to exercise more. Many of us set lofty goals that require significant, regular commitment, but then abandon them because they’re too heavy to take on board. Plans to exercise more in the new year are often broken within one month.
So how can we exercise more regularly in the new year?
If the goal is to build long-term fitness and health, exercise must be sustainable. It may be possible to resolve to do a few extra minutes of muscle-strengthening exercises each day.
Our research suggests that even one muscle twitch a day, five days a week, can improve muscle strength if you maintain it for a month.
Why do we need to exercise?
Physical Activity Guidelines advised we perform 150 minutes of moderately intense exercise per week, as well as at least two muscle-strengthening exercise sessions per week.
Skeletal muscle tissue declines with age, leading to loss of function and independence in older people. It is therefore important to regularly include muscle strengthening exercises to stimulate the skeletal muscles of the legs, arms and core.
However, 85% of Australians don’t meet physical activity recommendations for doing aerobic and muscle-strengthening exercises per week. the reasons include a lack of time, a lack of motivation and no access to a training room.
It is important to remove these barriers because physical inactivity increases the risk many chronic diseases such as heart disease, diabetes, cancer, osteoporosis (weakened bones), dementia, depression and anxiety.
Short bursts of exercise can increase your muscle strength
my research team recent study found a small amount of regular resistance training may be better than doing a massive session, even if the amount of exercise overall was the same.
We asked participants to do an arm curl exercise consisting of 30 maximal contractions (thus, contracting the muscle as hard as they could) every week for four weeks. One group did six contractions a day for five days a week; the other did 30 repetitions once a week.
The group that did them all at once did not gain muscle strength, while the group that spread all 30 reps over five days increased their muscle strength by more than 10%.
In one separate studywe showed that doing a bicep muscle contraction for three seconds a day, five days a week, increased muscle strength by 12%.
Participants contracted their muscles from a flexed position to an extended position, like slowly lowering a heavy weight.
In both studies, participants used special equipment in our lab and used as much force as they could, but slowly lowering a heavy dumbbell multiple times could yield similar results.
Incorporate exercise into your daily activities
We study the effects of daily five-minute “eccentric” exercises on the health and fitness of sedentary people. Eccentric exercises activate and lengthen the muscles.
We have previously studied the effects of sitting slowly in a chair and found that it is efficient to improve leg muscle strength, ability to sit upright in a chair, ability to walk and balance in the elderly.
Many of us sit on a chair or sofa more than ten times a day. So if we sit down slowly every time we sit, we perform at least ten eccentric contractions of the muscles that work to extend the knee joints, per day. This is a good opportunity for us to perform eccentric exercises daily to simulate our leg muscles.
Eccentric contractions don’t just affect muscles, they can also improve health indicators such as blood pressure and cholesterol levels.
Start small, then build momentum
Our studies have focused on resistance exercise, but this also applies to aerobic exercise. Five minutes of walking a day can still be beneficial for your health.
However, if you already do regular workouts each week, adding a little exercise each day may not produce much additional effect, so there is no need to replace a regular exercise routine with new ones. smaller micro-sessions.
But for those just starting out, who might find committing to significant physical exercise daunting, getting a little exercise, often, is a good start. Once your physical condition has improved, you can add more exercise.
So how about making a resolution to spend five minutes exercising every day in 2023?
