A Day in the Life of Perfect Health:

How to move as much as you should without losing your job!

By this point we know that there are a number of activities that are integral to high levels of health and fitness, including liberal amounts of “just move” zone 0 activity spread throughout your day, an ample amount of zone 1 “easy exercise”, some strength training, a dash of speed training and lots and lots of high quality rest. This is a lot to balance within our daily schedule, not to mention the fact that we probably aren’t getting paid for exercising either - so, for many of us, there are also not small amounts of desk time to squeeze in there as well!

It can be quite overwhelming to answer the question, “How do we fit it all in?” Just how much of each do we need for optimal health? What’s the ideal daily breakdown that will lead to the best cardio-metabolic health markers while still enabling us to keep a job and pay our bills?

Fear not! Science is here to help us answer that very question - Just what is the optimal breakdown of hours in a day that leads to the highest levels of health?

One of my favorite papers of all time is on this very topic - commonly entitled, “The Goldilocks Study”:

“Associations of 24 h time‑use compositions of sitting, standing, physical activity and sleeping with optimal cardiometabolic risk and glycaemic control: The Maastricht Study”[i]

In this paper, the authors used accelerometer data from 2388 participants to analyze how they spent their average day, from a movement perspective. That is, how much of their 24 hours were spent sleeping, how many hours were spent sitting, standing and in light or moderate to vigorous physical activity?

In this case, moderate-vigorous physical activity was basically set to be at or above a brisk walk (100 steps/min), while light activity was any movement below this point – typically more incidental things – gardening, household chores, etc.

In addition to this movement “day in the life” data, they also collected a number of cardio-metabolic health markers to compare the different levels of movement against, namely – Fasting Plasma Glucose, 2hr Plasma Glucose (i.e. response to a Glucose Tolerance Test), HbA1c (a long-term blood glucose marker), insulin sensitivity, & an overall cardiometabolic risk score.

Now for the cool part…

After accumulating this mass of activity input and health output measures, they were able to put together a model of the impact of each of the daily activity input measures on the health output measures and using this model, they were able to run some really interesting “what if” analyses…

Most notably, by asking the question…

“If I traded 30 minutes of sit time in my day for 30 minutes of standing, or light activity, or moderate activity, how much health benefit would that actually be worth?”

And, in many cases, the answer was A LOT!