Have you ever fallen asleep during a lecture?

There’s that moment where your hand keeps trying to take notes, even though your brain has gone offline. You wake to see a long scribble that does little to capture what the professor was saying while you were snoozing.

As it turns out, so many people doze off during long lectures that educators actively look for ways to keep students awake during class.

That brings us to today’s study, which examined whether short exercise breaks could help college students remain alert during long lectures.

What the study found

To keep their students awake and engaged, psychology professors at Ohio State University tested to see what would happen if they allowed students to get up and move around during their 80-minute classes.

The professors called for a five-minute movement break at the 25- and 40-minute mark in their classes. Students did a mixture of aerobic, strength-building, yoga, balance, and breathing exercises, the exact mix of which varied from day to day.

At the end of the semester, students filled out evaluation forms. Based on the student feedback, researchers concluded that having movement breaks during their seminars helped boost their attention and engagement.(1)

Movement can boost multiple dimensions of health.

In addition to improving mental focus, students who took exercise breaks reported enjoying the course more. They also noted that the breaks offered opportunities to engage more with their peers.

From a Deep Health perspective, this intervention can potentially check multiple boxes.

Most obviously, regular movement breaks can improve physical health.

But the change in stimuli can also help you feel more refreshed when returning to work or study, improving mental health—and possibly even existential health, if your improved focus allows you to devote more energy to a purpose, such as a meaningful work project, or earning a degree or certificate.

Of course, if movement is done in the company of others, it can also boost social health. (If nothing else, you can bond with your peers about how awkward it feels to do walking lunges in the middle of a seminar room.)

Takeaways

1. This isn’t a protocol.

When research like the above comes out, Internet gurus jump on it, telling their followers, “If you want to stay productive, you have to exercise for five minutes, every 20 to 25 minutes.”

While this research points toward the benefits of movement breaks, it doesn’t necessarily illuminate an ideal strategy for taking them. More research is needed to determine whether less frequent breaks—say, once an hour or every other hour—work just as effectively. Similarly, a one-minute stroll around the office may be just as capable of renewing someone’s productivity as five minutes.

The main takeaway is…

2. It’s probably a good idea to regularly interrupt sitting.

For those of you who are “allergic to exercise,” interrupted sitting offers an accessible, zero-sweat alternative.

Not only can short movement breaks improve attention, as today’s study found, but they may also help improve some markers of health as robustly as formal exercise.

In a separate study, 18 overweight men either sat for 8.5 hours straight or took movement breaks that consisted of one of the following:

• One 30-minute walking break per day

• A three-minute walking break for every 45 minutes of sitting, for a total of 30 minutes of daily movement

• Three minutes of squatting exercises for every 45 minutes of sitting, for a total of 30 minutes of daily movement

All protocols improved blood sugar levels compared to continuous sitting—no surprise there. However, the shorter walking and squatting breaks (that were spread out throughout the day) lowered glucose more than the single walk break. (2)

“These superior benefits seem to be associated with increased muscle activity intensity in the targeted muscle groups during frequent transitions from sitting to activity,” the researchers wrote.

In other words, healthy movement may be as much about "not being sedentary" as it is about "being active."

All the best,

Michael Beiter

Certified Personal Trainer

PN L1 Sleep, Stress Management, and Recovery coach

References

1. Hayes SM. Establishing the feasibility of exercise breaks during university lectures. Front Sports Act Living. 2024 Apr 4;6:1358564.

2. Gao Y, Li QY, Finni T, Pesola AJ. Enhanced muscle activity during interrupted sitting improves glycemic control in overweight and obese men. Scand J Med Sci Sports. 2024 Apr;34(4):e14628.