Integrating exercise into daily life: the potential of “exercise snacks” for healthy longevity

One of the central pillars of healthy longevity is the maintenance of regular physical activity across the lifespan. Exercise represents one of the most effective strategies to optimize human potential and is widely acknowledged for mitigating the physical, psychological, and social challenges associated with ageing [1]. Adequate levels of exercise that improve muscle strength and power, as well as cardiorespiratory fitness, substantially reduce the risk of non-communicable diseases [[2], [3], [4]] and are strongly associated with lower all-cause mortality in later life [[5], [6], [7], [8]].

Importantly, many age-related declines are more closely related to physical inactivity than to inevitable physiological deterioration [9]. In this context, healthy habits—including regular physical activity or structured exercise, healthy food consumption, maintenance of social engagement, and continued cognitive stimulation—are fundamental for promoting healthy longevity. Long-term adherence to these behaviors characterizes what has been described as an exercising phenotype, which is associated with numerous benefits, including the mitigation of exercise deficiency diseases and a reduction in the period of morbidity. Individuals presenting this phenotype tend to maintain more favorable physiological regulation with ageing, as muscle strength, power output, maximal oxygen uptake (VO₂_peak), muscle mass, and overall physical functioning remain at good to excellent levels [1].

Despite the well-established benefits of regular physical activity for preserving physical and cognitive function across the lifespan [1], adherence to structured exercise programs remains suboptimal worldwide. Lack of time is consistently reported as one of the main barriers to exercise participation, together with environmental constraints and limited access to facilities [10]. In addition, mobility limitations and psychological barriers may also prevent adherence especially in older populations [11]. These challenges represent an important public health challenge, as physical inactivity remains a major contributor to the global burden of non-communicable diseases.

In response to these challenges, time-efficient exercise strategies have gained increasing attention in recent years. Among them, the concept of “exercise snacks” has emerged as a promising and pragmatic approach to integrating physical activity into daily routines [12]. Exercise snacks can be defined as brief bouts of vigorous or high-intensity exercise performed intermittently throughout the day [13]. Typically lasting from a few seconds to a few minutes, these bouts may include activities such as stair climbing, bodyweight exercises, or short cycling sprints performed periodically across the day [14]. Because these interventions require minimal time commitment and can be performed in a variety of environments—including at home, at the workplace, or in community settings—they may represent an attractive strategy to facilitate exercise engagement among adults facing the time constraints of modern lifestyles [12,14].

Emerging evidence suggests that exercise snack interventions may represent a promising strategy to improve key health-related outcomes, including cardiorespiratory fitness, muscular function, and several markers of cardiometabolic health in adults [[15], [16], [17]]. In older adults, short-term interventions have demonstrated improvements in functional outcomes and muscle size in healthy and pre-frail older adults [15,18]. Similarly, longer interventions have shown benefits in lower-limb muscular endurance and balance in frail older adults [19]. Because these brief and fragmented bouts of physical activity require minimal time commitment and can be easily integrated into daily routines, they have attracted increasing interest as a scalable and time-efficient strategy to promote health across the lifespan. Nevertheless, the available evidence remains heterogeneous, and some studies have reported inconsistent effects on cardiometabolic outcomes.

In this context, the systematic review and meta-analysis by Zhang et al. [20] published in the current issue of the Journal of Nutrition, Health and Aging, provides a timely synthesis of randomized controlled trials examining the effects of exercise snack interventions on cardiorespiratory fitness and body composition in healthy and sub-healthy adults. Overall, the findings suggest that these interventions can improve physical capacities such as peak power output during graded exercise testing (W_peak), VO₂_max, and functional performance. These adaptations are particularly relevant given that cardiorespiratory fitness and functional capacity are among the strongest predictors of healthy aging and longevity. Although no consistent effects were observed for body composition or fatigue-related outcomes, the results reinforce the potential of short, time-efficient exercise strategies to enhance key physiological determinants of health.

Engagement in exercise programs that combine resistance or power training with endurance exercise remains essential across the lifespan for promoting physical fitness and preventing non-communicable diseases, disability, and prolonged periods of morbidity in later life. Beyond its preventive and therapeutic roles, exercise may also synergistically enhance the benefits of other lifestyle factors, including a healthful diet, adequate sleep, and strong social connections [21].

Within this broader context, exercise snack interventions represent a feasible strategy to overcome one of the most frequently reported barriers to physical activity participation—lack of time [22]. By incorporating brief and repeated bouts of vigorous activity into daily life, individuals may accumulate meaningful physiological stimuli without the need for traditional structured exercise sessions. Such an approach may be particularly valuable in modern societies where time constraints frequently limit adherence to conventional exercise programs. Nevertheless, the current evidence base remains limited. Future research should expand the body of knowledge by examining exercise snack protocols across a broader range of health outcomes, including physical, metabolic, and cognitive domains. Comparative trials evaluating different protocols and investigations in diverse clinical populations are warranted, particularly in older populations, including individuals with sarcopenia, frailty, or cognitive impairment.

If future trials confirm the promising findings observed to date, exercise snacks may represent a pragmatic and feasible strategy to integrate physical activity into everyday life. Such interventions could play an important role in reducing sedentary behavior and promoting healthy longevity across the population.

Author contributions

E.L.C. and C. P.-D. wrote the first draft, reviewed and edited the final version.

Declaration of Generative AI and AI-assisted technologies in the writing process

The authors declare that they did not use generative AI in the manuscript preparation.

Declaration of competing interest

The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.