Muscles help you move, lift things, pump blood through your body, and even help you breathe.
Increased muscle mass can lead to less body fat, a stronger immune system, improved energy levels, and reduced stress.
In a study from the University of Toronto, scientists found that interrupting prolonged sitting with periodic “activity snacks” may help maintain muscle mass and quality.
Activity snacks or moderate intensity exercise—such as two minutes of walking or body weight sit-to-stand squats—allow the body to use more amino acids from meals to build muscle proteins.
Prolonged sedentary periods have been proven to impair the body’s ability to filter sugar from the blood following a meal but has unknown effects on amino acids.
In this study, researchers studied 12 people (seven men, five women) across three trials for seven and a half hours each.
Participants were subjected to prolonged sitting interrupted every 30 minutes by short bouts of walking or body-weight squats.
The team found the activity helped improve the efficiency of dietary amino acids used for muscle protein synthesis, the process to repair or replace old or damaged proteins.
This is critical to ensure the body has an adequate quantity and quality of muscle.
The team says a sedentary lifestyle is associated with loss of muscle mass.
Therefore, the results highlight the importance of breaking up prolonged sedentary periods with brief activity snacks.
The researchers believe their results also highlight that moving after they eat can also make their nutrition better and could allow more dietary amino acids from smaller meals or lower quality types of protein to be used more efficiently.
If you care about health, please read studies about a major cause of earlier death in men, and Krill oil could improve muscle health in older people.
For more information about health, please see recent studies about chronic health conditions that may triple your COVID-19 death risk, and results showing vitamin D supplements strongly reduces cancer death.
The study was conducted by Daniel Moore et al and published in the Journal of Applied Physiology.
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