Tracking what your body needs

Exercise scientist Keith Diaz spent 15 years trying to prove that exercise could overcome the harms of sitting. He failed. His research instead confirmed that even regular exercisers face serious health risks from prolonged sedentary time—and the solution is not more gym time, but frequent, short movement breaks woven into the workday. In a massive 2023 study with NPR’s Body Electric project, Diaz and his team tested what works in the real world, and the answer surprised even him: five minutes of movement, five times a day, is enough to see meaningful improvements in fatigue and well-being.

Why exercise alone isn’t enough

Diaz began his career wanting to debunk a headline claiming that running wasn’t enough to counteract sitting. “I didn’t believe it,” he says. But after 15 years of research, he came to see the problem differently. The issue is not that exercise is useless—it’s that exercise occupies only a tiny fraction of your waking hours. The rest of the day, your muscles go unused. And muscles are not just motors for movement; they are metabolic regulators. Diaz explains that muscles act like sponges for blood sugar. When you contract them regularly, they stay moist and absorb glucose from the bloodstream. When you sit for hours, the sponge dries out and shrivels. Exercise rewets the sponge, but it dries again if you remain still the rest of the day. This is why even