Typical everyday movements cause specific patterns in heart rate, 2024, Max J. Heidelbach et al

Physical inactivity and sedentary behaviour are important risk factors for cardiovascular disease. Knowledge about the impact of everyday movements on cardiac autonomic regulation is sparse.

This study aims to provide evidence that typical everyday movements show a clear impact on heart rate regulation. 40 healthy participants performed two everyday movements: (1) calmly kneeling down (“tie one’s shoes”) and standing up again and (2) raising the arms to the horizontal (“expressive yawning”). Both movements elicited reproducible pattern in the sequence of heart periods. Local minima and local maxima appeared in the transient period of approx. 30 s.

The regulatory response for ergometer cycling, which was used as control, did not show a pattern formation. Calmly performed everyday movements are able to elicit rich cardiac regulatory responses including specific patterns in heart rate.

These newly described patterns have multiple implications for clinical and rehabilitative medicine, basic research, digital health data processing, and public health. If carried out regularly these regulatory responses may help to mitigate the burden of physical inactivity and enrich cardiovascular regulation.

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I've been lifting very light 2-4lb weights for the last 10 months for a few minutes on and off throughout the day depending on how I'm feeling and I'm building muscle for the first time. It is improving my upper body strength while sitting upright. I'm not as fatigued overall. I'm noticing more muscle tone now too. I can't do resistance training with my larger muscle groups ex legs, but training my upper body is improving my overall strength.

I hope I can continue.

 

From the study:

Everyday movements are rarely considered relevant for cardiac health because they are obviously not considered as an exercise. However, recent findings suggest that even light-intensity activity is more beneficial than no activity (Del Pozo Cruz et al., 2021; World Health Organization, 2022).

Changing sedentary behaviour to any kind of simple physical activity, even standing, seems to be favorable (Blodgett et al., 2024).

 

I have not read the study but I see that the authors are from the “Integrated Curriculum for Anthroposophic Medicine” at a German university. As far as I’m aware, anthroposophy is a pseudoscientific discipline if not a sect. I would interpret their findings paper with caution.