Abstract
Recently revised public health guidelines acknowledge the health benefits of regular intermittent bouts of vigorous intensity incidental physical activity done as part of daily living, such as carrying shopping bags, walking uphill, and stair climbing. Despite this recognition and the advantages such lifestyle physical activity has over continuous vigorous intensity structured exercise, a scoping review we conducted revealed that current research in this area is, at best, rudimentary. Key gaps include the absence of an empirically-derived dose specification (e.g., minimum duration of lifestyle physical activity required to achieve absolute or relative vigorous intensity), lack of acceptable measurement standards, limited understanding of acute and chronic (adaptive) effects of intermittent vigorous bouts on health, and paucity of essential information necessary to develop feasible and scalable interventions (e.g., acceptability of this kind of physical activity by the public). To encourage collaboration and research agenda alignment among groups interested in this field, we propose a research framework to further understanding of vigorous intermittent lifestyle physical activity (VILPA). This framework comprises four pillars aimed at the development of: (a) an empirical definition of VILPA, (b) methods to reliably and accurately measure VILPA, (c) approaches to examine the short and long-term dose–response effects of VILPA, and (d) scalable and acceptable behavioural VILPA-promoting interventions.Graphic
Highlights
Physical inactivity, or insufficient physical activity (PA), is a major cause of non-communicable chronic disease responsible for at least 5 million premature deaths per year [1]
Prompted by changes in the 2018 US [18] and 2019 UK [19] PA guidelines, we have recently proposed a new paradigm which would allow vigorous PA to be more accessible to people who are currently inactive through the regular accumulation of vigorous intermittent lifestyle physical activity (VILPA) [17]
While VILPA is more closely integrated within daily living than, e.g., leisure-time physical activity, future research should be prepared to address some behaviour change challenges analogous to increasing continuous cumulative moderate to vigorous PA (MVPA)
Summary
Vigorous Intermittent Lifestyle Physical Activity (VILPA) is characterised by brief bouts of incidental physical activity that are done during activities of daily living. VILPA may be more feasible than structured vigorous exercise in some population groups, it is an unexplored aspect of physical activity. The research framework we propose covers development of an empirical VILPA definition, improvements in the free-living VILPA measurement, studies to better understand its dose–response effects on health, and the development of scalable and acceptable behavioural VILPA-promoting interventions
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