SUMMARY BY CHATGPT

In this episode of the podcast Episode 1117 – Exercise Snacks, Tom Antion discusses the concept of “exercise snacks” — very short bursts of physical activity done throughout the day instead of long gym workouts.
Key points from the episode:
• Exercise snacks are also known as:
o movement snacks
o micro workouts
o activity bursts
o mini workouts
o VILPA (“vigorous intermittent lifestyle physical activity”)
• The idea is that small, repeated activities integrated into daily life can provide major health benefits without requiring dedicated gym time.
• Tom explains that this approach is especially useful for:
o people glued to computers all day
o busy entrepreneurs
o older adults
o people intimidated by gyms
o people who struggle to stick to traditional workout programs
• He shares his own problem with sedentary work habits and how long gym routines tend to fail once life gets busy.
• Examples of exercise snacks include:
o sprinting up stairs
o doing squats during breaks
o walking on a treadmill while working
o lifting groceries
o playing actively with a dog
o using everyday movements as mini workouts
• Tom plans to:
o run up stairs instead of walking
o turn dog playtime into active exercise
o incorporate squats and movement breaks during work
• He references research showing these short activity bursts may:
o improve cardiovascular fitness
o increase VO2 max (linked to longevity)
o improve blood sugar control
o reduce the health damage from prolonged sitting
o improve brain function and circulation
o sometimes outperform a single long workout done after sitting all day
• One of the biggest findings: people are far more likely to consistently stick with exercise snacks than formal exercise programs.
• The central theme is making movement part of your lifestyle instead of treating exercise as a separate, difficult task.
The episode ends with Tom encouraging listeners to incorporate movement naturally throughout the day while continuing to build online businesses and improve productivity.

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Episode 1117 – Exercise Snacks
[00:00:08] Welcome to Screw the Commute. The entrepreneurial podcast dedicated to getting you out of the car and into the money, with your host, lifelong entrepreneur and multimillionaire, Tom Antion.
[00:00:24] Hey everybody, it's Tom here with episode 1117 of Screw the Commute podcast. That's 1117. And today we're going to talk about listen to this exercise snacks. And I'm not talking about shoving chips in your face. Okay. I'm talking about something totally different that's been around for a while, but it's made a resurgence. And let's see, episode 1116 is all on the benefits of podcasting, having your own podcast. So it's really something that can make you a lot of money, improve your authority and all kinds of good stuff. Let's see. Anytime you want to get to a back episode like 1116 on podcasting, you go to screwthecommute.com, slash, the episode number and then also pick up a copy of my automation book at screwthecommute.com/automatefree. Version 3.0 is the latest and you will hear in that or read in that version 3.0 about short keys, which I've been promoting for years as a program that saves you millions of keystrokes. But it's no longer a program. It's now a browser extension. So make that change before I come out with a version for. All right, greatinternetmarketingtraining.com is where you check out my mentor program. And IMTCVA.org is where my certified to operate by SCHEV school lives.
[00:01:53] Okay. I said lots of times tell you stuff I'm working on myself and I'm just starting this. So I can't claim that this is the best thing since sliced bread. But a lot of people do. And that's called exercise snacks. And I was I was listening to a podcast by Doctor Rhonda Patrick.
[00:02:13] She is very well known in the health and wellness industries, and she was talking about exercise, snacks and all the research that's emerging that very short bursts during your during the day can be as good as going to the gym for an hour long workout. Now, the names of these things, if you want to look it up, there are so many names. I'm going to rattle off a bunch of them, but there's probably 60 or 70 more ways these things are called. So here's a here's a quick list of them. Exercise snacks is the one I started with, but workout snacks, movement, snacks, micro workouts, micro exercise activity bursts, activity breaks, movement breaks, physical activity bursts. Mini workouts. Short bout exercises. Distributed exercises. Fragmented exercises. And like I said, there's a million more. But here's the researcher one called VILPA and it stands for vigorous intermittent lifestyle physical activity. Okay. What it boils down to is that little stuff that you do during the day consistently can keep you from going to an hour long workout in the gym. And this has been my downfall in my later years, is I'm just in glued to this computer, working around the world, selling stuff and teaching people and doing all this stuff day and night and developing new things like the last couple of weeks has been clones and it just never ends. And I said a lot. And sedentary is, you know, called the new smoking, you know, just sitting around too long.
[00:04:06] So. And a couple months ago, well, I don't know how many months ago was now I got the idea. You know what? I'm not going to start my day until noon and then I'm going to work out. I have my own gym. Even I don't even have to go anywhere. And I, I lasted for a couple months until my documentary said, we're a green lighted. And I'm like, oh, now I got this whole massive project to help promote the premiere. And then we got a new rescue dog. And so that thing fell by the wayside. I'm not using my own gym, so this seems to be perfect for people that are glued to the computer. Can't take an hour off to go to the gym, don't even like to do such a thing, don't even want to do. Maybe they're embarrassed to go to the gym and and but they still want to improve their health. So and even the terminology, a lot of like I said, there's 60 or 70 other terms. There's a lot of psychology behind it. For instance, the word workout scares people, but a movement snack feels like it's harmless. No big deal. You know, there isn't really any standard terminology for this stuff, but this thing with vigorous intermittent lifestyle, physical activity, the key word there is lifestyle. So for me, I'm going to start out with two simple things. One is, is I got this new rescue dog and I got to play ball with him.
[00:05:43] And he's only three years old, as opposed to my other older dogs that are happy to just sleep all day. So this, this little guy wants to go. So from now on, when I play with him 4 or 5 times a day out on the tennis court with the balls and running around. You know, he's running around, but I'm just standing there throwing the ball. And I'm going to start running and picking up balls. And I'll probably squat down to pick them all as if in a squat to work my quadriceps. That's one little thing that's not taking any extra time out of my day. That and I'll get into the benefits of this stuff later. There's been a lot of research on this lately. And then the other thing is, is I have to go upstairs, you know, quite a few times per day to get stuff out of my room up there or to take stuff up there or whatever. So now I'm going to start sprinting up the steps. And I was looking into getting an Apple Watch or some, you know, Garmin thing, but I said, you know, I'm not going to spend 500 bucks on this just to run up the steps. All right. So, so anyway, this isn't really a brand new thing. It actually started around the 1990s. There were some magazine articles about it, but it wasn't like badass enough, you know, for those days.
[00:07:05] And then then in 2007, a guy named Howard Hartley kind of coined the term this, put the snack involved with it. And then in 2014, a lot of researchers got interested in this because and here's one thing. All the other great exercise programs that require you to, you know, put an hour away and do this every day or five days a week or whatever. People were just not doing it. They were just failing at it. So the researchers wanted to figure out, hey, can we find out something that people will actually do that can be just as good or better than what was failing? I mean, it'd be great if you could put the hour in five times a week and take a couple days off on the weekend and, you know, whatever, it's great if you could do it, but most people can't or won't. And so it really exploded when Covid took around because people did have they weren't doing the commute. You know, they screwed the commute because they're all working from home. And half the time they're probably on the clock and not even working. So, so they had extra time to do these things and they could work it into their doing laundry. You know, they could do curls with their laundry basket. I mean, this is what we call lifestyle stuff. And then in 2020, it really took off with the movement snacks for the older generation and the anti gym generation and the wellness community and the longevity community really latched on to this around 2020.
[00:08:45] Now here's the deal. Here's just a smattering of the benefits of this. And you can of course Google it or ChatGPT it and, find like way more than what I'm going to give you in this short podcast. But they found that if you did this, it improved your cardio fitness and your VO2 max. Vo2 Max is one of the main indicators of longevity. And to measure it, there's, there's ways you can measure it, kind of estimate it. And then you can, you can go into these laboratories and get it really, really chimed in exactly what your VO2 max is. But again, nobody does it. But they have found that these people that are doing these short exercise snacks as part of their lifestyle. And another thing is, you know, I sit here for many hours during the day. So jumping up and doing. I remember for a while I was doing 25 squats a two times a day, body body weight squats, and I kind of faded away from that. But now I'm going to think, hey, that wasn't. Now they're saying just do ten. Every time you get up to go to the bathroom or something. Um, and they also found these are heavy duty researchers, by the way, and I don't have the names of the studies, but you can of course look it up. People had better endurance and blood sugar control was a big one.
[00:10:20] So they weren't spiking their blood sugar and insulin, all that and creating insulin resistance and all that bad stuff that's associated with it. And they found that brief throughout the day doing this stuff as part of your lifestyle. It could be you're grabbing your baby and you know how people hold their baby up in front of them. You could do curls with the baby, the baby's laughing, and now you're getting a little mini workout. You're spiking your your heart rate a little bit. But they found that those brief things do done throughout the day outperformed one continuous workout, like sitting all day and then going to the gym for one hour. Doing this stuff throughout the day outperformed people's cardiovascular fitness and their endurance and things like that, and they also concluded that it lowered the sedentary damage. You know, they called it sitting the new smoking. Well, I might as well have just stuck my head in a in a gas chamber. I mean, the way I've been sitting for all these years, but that it lowers the damage of doing that. And there's plenty of cognitive and brain benefits. You can think better, you get better circulation through your brain and everything. But but overall they can. And there's loads of other benefits. All right. But overall, they concluded that the best benefit of the whole thing was that in some studies 80 to 90% of the people stuck with it.
[00:12:03] Instead of like me going a couple months full blast in the mornings and then kind of fizzled when I got busy, you know? So it's something that you can, uh, since it doesn't take any extra time, it's just part of your lifestyle. And it may be, uh, you know, you're pushing your kid in a stroller a couple times a day. Well, maybe you get one of those running strollers and run behind it. Um, you know, the, the lifting groceries, uh, doing curls with bottles of milk and stuff. I mean, you know, it's just anything you can think of that pushes yourself a little bit and spikes your heart rate while you're doing something else that you would have had to do anyway. So that's a little bit about exercise snacks. And like I said, I'm going to start doing it as of today and, um, pick it back up. And I think it'll be successful for me because I know as soon as I see those steps, I know I got to go up there and so I double time it this time. And I know that I can't let the dog sit in the crate. The young dog. I got to go out and play with him and get him exercise and train him. And at the same time I can be working on myself. See, so that's the whole point of this vigorous intermittent lifestyle. Physical activity. Okey dokey. That's my story and I'm sticking to it.
[00:13:24] If you'd like to sit on your butt and make money like I've been doing all these years, 32 years online since the commercial internet started, uh, check out my mentor program. Greatinternetmarketingtraining.com. That's another thing I can do training while I'm standing up. And I actually put another computer on a treadmill over there where I can walk even at one mile an hour is better than sitting. See, so I have two computer stations and so that's something I'll pick pick up more also. So anyway, check out my mentor program, greatInternetMarketingtraining.com and my school at IMTCVA.org, certified to operate by SCHEV. Hey, there's coaching, there's my coaching going off because I forgot to turn my phone off. Anyway, yeah, the school was certified to operate by chef, the State Council on Higher Education in Virginia. But you don't have to be in Virginia because it's quality distance learning and probably save you a couple hundred thousand bucks. And if you are diligent, probably going to change the course of your life. All right. Okey doke. I'll catch you on the next episode. I got to go do some exercise snacks, I hope, I hope my mind doesn't forget about that and like, oh, I need a snack. I'll go get some potato chips or something I got. Maybe I should use one of these other monikers. Like an activity burst. That's that's better. I think they'll keep me away from the refrigerator. All right, catch you later.