It’s called “incidental activity,” and it could be a secret key to cardiovascular fitness. Basically, incidental activity includes everything from walking to the coffee machine to tapping your pencil on your desk, all of the movements made by all of the parts of your body that you wouldn’t consider exercise. The New York Times reports on a study a in the journal Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise that attempts to define the health benefit of such “activities of daily living.” The paper reports that researchers at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario outfitted a group of sedentary and overweight adult men and women with a device that would record all of the steps they took over the course of a day, along with most of their other movements. After four days of recording, the researchers compared the amount of movement a person made to his or her VO2 max. They found that those who moved the most had significantly higher cardiorespiratory fitness than those who moved the least.
Health, fitness and lifestyle tips for people over 50 who still like to play hard
Thursday, October 16, 2025