If Exercise Snacks Are Beneficial: It's Time to Reevaluate Physical Activity Questionnaires

Abstract

We argue that if “exercise snacks” are truly beneficial, current physical activity questionnaires need to be reconsidered. Questionnaires remain the most widely used tools for assessing physical activity in large-scale epidemiological studies because they are inexpensive, feasible, and easy to administer. However, many widely used instruments, such as the International Physical Activity Questionnaire and the Global Physical Activity Questionnaire, only record activities that last at least 10 consecutive minutes, and some tools apply even higher bout-duration thresholds. These conventions were consistent with earlier physical activity guidelines and simplified recall for respondents, but they are increasingly misaligned with contemporary evidence and lifestyles. Recent guidelines from the World Health Organization and the United States have removed the requirement that activity be accumulated in bouts of ≥10 minutes. At the same time, emerging experimental and epidemiological research indicates that very brief, fragmented bouts of activity—sometimes lasting only seconds to a few minutes—can meaningfully improve cardiometabolic markers, interrupt sedentary time, and are associated with lower mortality risk. This commentary highlights the risk that traditional questionnaires systematically undercount these “exercise snacks” and thereby underestimate both true activity levels and the health potential of fragmented, high-intensity or lifestyle-embedded movements. We propose that existing questionnaires be reevaluated and potentially revised to remove or lower bout-duration thresholds, and that new tools be developed specifically to capture fragmented activity patterns (e.g., through diaries or brief-event recording). Future validation studies should explicitly test how these revised measures relate to health outcomes, thereby clarifying the role of fragmented physical activity in public health surveillance and guideline development.

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