Hate the Gym? Sneak More Activity Into Your Day

Walking the dog and sweeping the floor count as exercise, research suggests

Christine Richmond

Updated June 16, 2025

A man carrying a crate of ripe tomatoes in a garden

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The message about the importance of regular exercise is hard to miss these days. There’s ample research-backed evidence that staying active is good for your heart, your brain and your waistline. It can help lower your risk of diabetes, Alzheimer’s and certain cancers. And yet, only 39 percent of adults ages 65 and older meet the current Centers for Disease Control and Prevention guidelines, which call for getting at least 150 minutes of aerobic exercise per week.

**Do you really have to exercise?**

Chances are, when you think about exercise, you imagine something like pedaling on a stationary bike at the gym or power walking around a track. But what if those activities aren't your favorites, but instead you could do something you find enjoyable — or that you need to do anyway — and still reap health benefits?

That’s where the idea of “non-exercise physical activity” comes in. Also known as nonrecreational physical activity, it’s things you do throughout your day when you’re not resting or working out — such as playing in the yard with your grandkids or walking up and down the grocery aisles. And research suggests that doing more of this type of movement is great for your brain and overall well-being.

In a study of 2,471 adults over age 65, the majority of whom did not formally exercise, those who were the most active in other ways — doing housework, gardening or taking care of pets — were more likely to remain independent in performing daily activities as they aged. Moving around while doing non-exercise physical activity may also help support cognitive function, according to the researchers, who published their results in BMJ Open in 2024.

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“Our bodies do not care whether we call activity ‘exercise’ or not, as long as it is activity of value,” says Scott Lear, professor of health sciences at Simon Fraser University in Canada. Lear co-authored a 2022 study published in JAMA Cardiology that looked at sedentary behavior and the risk of mortality and heart disease in more than 105,000 people between the ages of 35 and 70.

The results showed that participants who sat the most faced a greater risk of death or a major cardiovascular event, such as stroke. But doing nonrecreational physical activities, such as cleaning or running errands instead of sitting, was an effective way to lower that risk.

Even for people who regularly hit the gym, sitting less and moving more throughout the day appears to help lower the risk of Alzheimer's disease. A study published in Alzheimer’s & Dementia in 2025 followed 404 adults with a mean age of 71 over a 7-year period; the participants took cognitive tests, received brain scans and wore activity monitors to track their movement. Although 87 percent of the participants met the recommended aerobic exercise guidelines, they were mostly inactive once they finished their workouts, averaging 13 hours of sedentary behavior per day.

The researchers found that people who sat around the most had a greater risk of brain shrinkage in areas associated with Alzheimer's disease and performed the worst on cognitive tests. “Minimizing the time spent sitting, even if you do exercise daily, reduces the likelihood of developing Alzheimer’s disease," lead author Marissa Gogniat, an assistant professor of neurology at the University of Pittsburgh, said in a statement.

Some of the world’s healthiest people just keep moving

If you think of exercise purely in terms of hours at the gym or steps counted on your fitness tracker, then you might be surprised to know that populations of people who’ve lived the longest, and remained physically and mentally healthy, have never done that sort of exercise. But they are definitely not couch potatoes. In fact, these healthy, mentally astute seniors are constantly on the move. They walk, dance, garden, cook, clean and climb stairs.

“Their houses are not full of the mechanical conveniences that have engineered movement out of our lives — they still do housework, cook from scratch, and do yard work and gardening with manual tools,” says Dan Buettner, author of The Blue Zones Secrets for Living Longer: Lessons From the Healthiest Places on Earth. Buettner’s research has focused on pockets he calls “blue zones,” or places with the highest numbers of healthy centenarians, and he found them in remote parts of Greece, Italy and Central America. “We’ve calculated that these people are nudged into movement every 20 minutes or so.”

Adding more movement to your life

In an earlier study, Lear found that people were able to do more activity if it was nonrecreational as opposed to, say, miles logged on a treadmill. “If you just fit activity into your life, you will probably end up doing more than if you just go to the gym,” he says.

So, want pizza for dinner? Make, knead and roll your own dough instead of calling for delivery. Need to do some shopping downtown? Park in one spot and then walk to your various destinations. Love fresh flowers? Dig up a patch of dirt and try growing your own. It doesn’t matter what you do — the key is to find opportunities to move more and sit less all day long.