Professor of physical activity reveals the small daily habit change to make for big health benefits
A few short bursts of more intense daily activity – such as climbing the stairs or gardening – have been linked with a lower risk of cardiovascular disease and cancer, but is it too good to be true? Professor Emmanuel Stamatakis tells Harry Bullmore the truth behind the ‘one minute of exercise a day adding years to your life’ headlines and what really makes a difference
It’s 2025, and there are myriad headlines around health hacks, each promising perks disproportionate to the amount of effort they require. You can understand why these are appealing; people are busy, time is a finite resource and effective exercise is, by its very nature, hard.
However, Professor Emmanuel Stamatakis of The University of Sydney says this information is often diluted, frequently leading to misrepresentation of the data and “snake oil” messaging. And he should know. A lot of the recent headlines are based on his studies around easy behaviour changes people can make to improve their health, but he stresses you need to pay attention to the details for them to be effective.
“Our epidemiological research findings are certainly encouraging, but sustained behaviour change is not easy,” says Stamatakis, a professor of physical activity, and one of the world’s leading authorities on how it can be used to improve health.
“It will take a lot of effort from us, the researchers, to identify the best ways to support people to change habits, and people need to be aware that it will take a fair amount of effort [from them] to change their habits and stick to them long term.”
For this reason, much of his research centres around small and feasible interventions which, if incorporated consistently into the routines of less active people, could offer measurable perks. Case in point: his most recent research demonstrates how five to 10 short daily bursts of vigorous lifestyle activity, such as climbing the stairs or carrying heavy shopping, can potentially lower the risk of cardiovascular disease, cancer and premature death among less active populations.
“It’s about making sure we distil our most promising findings into tangible and attractive physical activity messages that encourage people who are not keen on traditional exercise to give it a go,” he says. “Brief bursts [of activity] can be tools in your toolkit for improving your health. It’s not about a silver bullet or a quick fix. This quick-fix mindset is detrimental for everyone.”
So what should we take from the learnings from the latest studies that move from magic bullet to practical and helpful advice to help more people live a better, healthier life?
Do your VILPA maths
Stamatakis’s most recent research centres around VILPA – an acronym for vigorous intermittent lifestyle physical activity. This refers to more intense daily movement that doesn’t fall under the umbrella of formal exercise, such as stair climbing, uphill walking, carrying heavy shopping or even vigorous gardening.
“We place a lot of emphasis on incidental physical activity because we want to lower the bar of participation and help more people get benefits from movement,” he explains. “Between five to 10 episodes of vigorous-intensity activity, lasting up to one minute, done on a daily basis, seems to be associated with between 30 and 50 per cent lower risk of cardiovascular conditions, cancer and mortality. This is a substantial effect, considering that it comes from a relatively low amount of daily physical activity.”
However, when this research was released, it was widely interpreted as 60 seconds of exercise per day being capable of adding years to your life – an “easy” message Stamatakis warns could detract from his serious efforts to encourage people to move more.
“Our research concerns a habitual behaviour which involves people who don’t exercise and are not keen to go to gyms or run, swim and cycle,” says Dr Matthew Ahmadi, co-investigator in this research programme and deputy director of the Mackenzie Wearables Research Hub at the University of Sydney’s Charles Perkins Centre. “This is a very different perspective, as you can imagine, to the idea that ‘one minute of exercise can save your life’.”
Yet, the introduction of a few minutes of intense incidental activity remains a feasible and more sustainable option for the target demographic: “The 80 to 85 per cent of the population, usually middle-aged and older adults, who are not keen on regular structured exercise”.
“It’s not about an optimal fitness solution,” Dr Ahmadi says. “If you want to become fully fit, of course, structured exercise is the way to go, but it comes with major commitments. You need to have the time, motivation and skills to know how to do it; sometimes you need to spend money on gym memberships and gear, and even travel to another place because not everyone lives near a park.
“There is a long list of reasons why most people don’t exercise regularly, or at all. This is the target population that our research is addressed to, and these are the people we want to help because they are at the highest risk of chronic disease and compromised lives.”
Read more: A cardiac nurse says these five daily behaviours can reduce your risk of heart disease
Aim for five to 10 bouts of intense activity a day
As mentioned above, VILPA in sedentary populations has been associated with a lower risk of cardiovascular disease, cancer and mortality. Stamatakis believes another major potential benefit lies outside measurable health metrics – VILPA’s role as a catalyst for encouraging people to move more, and potentially try structured exercise later down the line.
“If people haven’t exercised at a vigorous level in years or decades, it may get them accustomed to the idea and the reality of physical exertion – the discomfort that often comes with it,” he says. “It may be a lot easier for someone to get a flavour for vigorous-intensity activity by walking faster or climbing up a few flights of stairs, as opposed to doing a gym session.
“Gyms and the offerings of the fitness industry are not necessarily everyone’s cup of tea – for many, it’s a very intimidating space. Add to this [the fact that many] environments prioritise cars and are hostile to pedestrians and cyclists, and it’s not people’s fault that they don’t move.
“So for us it’s about creating more options for them, and giving them more accessible ways to get started. The biggest benefit of short bursts of intense activity for this group would be that they become a gateway to people initiating a more formal exercise programme, or introducing a few faster and longer walks into their weekly routines.”
How to get into the ‘VILPA’ body zone
The intensity of an activity can be interpreted as how hard your body is working to perform it.
“Vigorous-intensity activity is defined as physical activity that significantly increases breathing and heart rate, typically characterised by an intensity level of 70 to 90 per cent of maximum heart rate, such as jogging or competitive sports,” a definition published in the ScienceDirect journal states. “It requires considerable metabolic effort, equivalent to six to nine times resting levels.”
Physical indicators that you are working at this level of intensity include hard, fast breathing and the inability to say more than a few words without pausing for breath.
“We focus on vigorous-intensity physical activity in this research programme because it is by far the most time-efficient form [of activity for achieving various health benefits]. It is the ‘physiological language’ the body best understands – the extra effort acts as a signal for the body to make adaptations and improvements in, say, how the heart functions or how the body absorbs and transports oxygen to the muscles. For these beneficial health adaptations to happen, the body needs to be pushed regularly, even if it is for a short period of time under one minute,” Stamatakis says.
“Essentially, we are talking about a basic athletic training principle. The adaptations represent the body’s preparations for the next time the same physical challenge is present. That’s why we want to harness the power of vigorous-intensity activity through this programme.”
Ask most people what they want from a routine and they will probably deliver the same surface-level answer: better health. But Stamatakis provides a more in-depth rationale.
“Exercise is wonderful,” he says. “There’s no doubt that it’s extremely powerful for preventing and managing disease, but it is an artificial behaviour. It is an adaptation to the lifestyles of the industrialised world we live in. Most jobs are sedentary, mechanised transportation is the standard and most of our leisure pursuits are screen-based, so the norm is to be static for much of the day.
“Our civilisation, mostly for the sake of convenience, efficiency and speed, has removed the need to be physically active in day-to-day life, and our bodies pay a high price for that.”
Cast your mind back to the roots of humanity, however, and you have hunter-gatherers – physiologically and genetically identical to us – who were forced to move continuously to source food and find safety. Now that need is gone, and movement must be engineered into our lifestyles to prevent a further downturn in humanity’s physical health.
“That was the deeper background thinking of our research,” says Stamatakis.
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