What’s Old Becomes New

My life started on a dairy farm.

We had about 50 Holstein cows, milking cows, and almost as many calves and heifers.

You don’t do much sitting around on a farm. I once counted the number of squats I performed from one milking session. I had at least 5 squats per cow. You had to attach a milking machine to the cow (one squat) check the process 2 or 3 times then remove the machine, carry it to the milkhouse and dump the milk into a large tank (now, milking is done in a “milking parlor” where you can milk several cows at once without doing any squats).

We had about 50 cows. So, one session of milking was close to 250 squats and we milked the cows twice a day, every day. That’s 500 squats per day, 3500 squats per week.

I also calculated my energy expenditure over the course of the day. My dad reminded me that one time I came in from the barn around noon to find 5 pies on the dining room table. I sat down and ate all of them. And I never gained weight.

Well,  yeah, I was young but I also was in near constant motion and spent around 6000 calories a day.

You might be thinking, “Dang, that’s a lot of squats and calories” and you’re right, it is, but it was from intermittent work. If I had to do 250 squats at one time, well, I would be splayed out on the barn floor.

You can’t call what I did on the farm High-Intensity Interval Training since the intensity was low. You wouldn’t even call it exercise really since the activity is so short and interrupted.

So what do you call it?

Researchers have two terms for the kind of work you do on a farm. The first is N.E.A.T – Non-Exercise Activity Thermogenesis. Do you know people who bounce their foot when they sit still? Like they have a bunch of nervous energy? Turns out that people who do that tend to manage their body fat more easily than people who don’t.

There’s even a device proven to help you boost your N.E.A.T activity called a HOVR. I suggest it for people who have knee pain since it’s a great way to keep your knees moving while you sit at a desk.

In addition to N.E.A.T., there’s something called HIIPA that can help you boost your overall health.

HIIPA stands for High-Intensity Incidental Physical Activity. HIIPA is any movement that boosts your heart rate for 30 seconds up to 10 minutes causing you to breath harder.

You might take a couple of flights of stairs or rake some leaves or shovel some snow or chase some cows – all of these things will raise your heart rate and respiratory rate. The result is a significant improvement in your overall health over time.  ^[1]Emmanuel Stamatakis, Nathan A Johnson, Lauren Powell, Mark Hamer, Vegar Rangul, Andreas Holtermann. Short and sporadic bouts in the 2018 US physical activity guidelines: is high-intensity incidental … Continue reading

This style of “exercise” is more easily achieved, easier to sustain over time for most people. When you think about your typical day, how easy is it to get to the gym every day? It’s not. But, I’ll bet you could perform 3 to 5 HIIPA sessions a day, no problem.

The other thing that helps you is the rest period. Back in the ’60s, an exercise physiologist studied work output on a stationary bike and found you could nearly triple your work output if you had brief (think seconds) rest periods between the work sessions.

I need to point out though that HIIPA sessions are not the same thing as training. Training develops fitness. You won’t develop much strength or agility or stamina doing HIIPA work. But you will improve things like your resting heart rate, blood pressure, cholesterol, and other general health metrics.

Farm life involves both N.E.A.T and HIIPA as a consequence of what you have to do to get your work done. For you, you’ll have to be more conscious about it, plan a way to get several, brief HIIPA sessions in per day.

But, you can do it.

Thanks for reading.

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