THE BIG QUESTION
If paying your dues in the squat rack has dropped off your list of priorities lately, you’re far from alone. Along with sarcasm and queueing, it seems we Brits are quite adept at skipping workouts. One survey commissioned by health body Ukactive concluded that we spend twice as much of our time making tea as we do working out, while in separate research by Nuffield Health, one in six reported doing no exercise at all in the past year.
But the reality might not be as glum as the stats suggest. Most people have a misconception about what constitutes exercise, viewing it as activities performed purely for the purpose of building fitness or burning fat. ‘This isn’t the case,’ says Adam Byrne, clinical fitness lead for Nuffield Health in Wimbledon, London. Carrying shopping bags, mowing the lawn, chasing your kids, taking the stairs – all of that falls under the bracket of ‘moderate activity’, of which you need just 150 minutes a week.
If weight loss is your goal, Steve, this kind of movement – which is often referred to as ‘non-exercise activity thermogenesis’ or NEAT – has more of an impact than you might think: most estimates suggest
NEAT contributes to 15% to 30% of your daily calorie
