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Workplace Wellness Lab delivers leading insights, ideas and information on wellness, health management, and healthy living.

Our goal is simple: Workplace Wellness Lab provides regular and better information as an important path to create healthy individual outcomes, while helping change health care in America.

By connecting the audiences that matter – consultants, corporate executives, policymakers, thought leaders, journalists, customers, and more – we establish a positive, substantive, and influential voice within the wellness industry that makes the case that:

    • Left unchecked, current trends in health spend and outcomes are unsustainable.
    • Given that half the healthcare dollars in this country are incurred by employers, well-executed preventive care health management programs in the worksite are clearly enduring and valuable, helping drive improved workplace environments and individual outcomes.
    • Industry coherence around private sector innovation to drive effective health management programs is economically vital, given what’s possible in a spend category that is arguably one of the greatest challenges in America today.

Workplace Wellness Lab comes at this challenge principally from the employer point of view: What are the credible and demonstrated best practices in preventive care to structure programs that have an enduring impact? How can the impact be made explicit, as something that is both the right thing to do and a proactive business initiative that lowers the cost of care, as experienced by both employers and employees?

And Workplace Wellness Lab goes beyond the workplace. It’s a robust platform filled with ideas and insights from those that influence how employers think about this opportunity: research organizations, non-profits, think tanks and more.

From an editorial point of view, great ideas can come from anywhere. With that philosophy in mind, we will combine our own original content with other content across the web. We organize the content, with a view to making it as simple and useful as possible.

All content will be sourced. If we found it somewhere, we’ll tell you where we got — and how to get to that site yourself.

We also welcome your comments — criticisms, ideas, and, yes, we take compliments, too! Have a thought of what you’d like to see — or see something you think others should know — drop us a line.

Thanks for visiting – and please come back again!

Transparency is extremely important to us, so we are letting you know that we may receive a commission on some of links you click on from this page. See our disclaimer.

Well-run workplace wellness programs offer guidance and engagement around getting employees to avoid prolonged sitting. As we reported yesterday, a new question may be: “Do you have two minutes?”

We noted the Journal of the American Heart Association study titled “Moderate‐to‐Vigorous Physical Activity and All‐Cause Mortality: Do Bouts Matter?” It has good information for well-run workplace wellness programs or employees who need opportunities for exercise.

The authors write: “The 2008 Physical Activity Guidelines for Americans recommends that adults accumulate at least 150 min/wk of moderate or 75 min/wk of vigorous‐intensity physical activity for substantial health benefits. The guidelines also direct that activity be performed in bouts of at least 10 minutes. The 10‐minute bout criterion originated in 1995 and was intended to provide flexibility in achieving the recommended dose.”

However, the authors explain why this time frame may be in question — and why the study matters:

“This messaging shift emphasized the importance of accumulating a total volume of moderate‐to‐vigorous physical activity (MVPA) and has remained a central feature of guidelines as they evolved. Surprisingly, evidence supporting a minimum bout of 10 minutes is limited. Recent studies comparing MVPA accumulated in bouts to total minutes regardless of bouts suggest that bouts provide no additional benefit regarding metabolic syndrome, waist circumference, and body mass index. However, these studies are limited to cross‐sectional designs that evaluated risk factors, making it difficult to understand the temporal sequence for the observed associations or the influence of MVPA bouts on end points, such as all‐cause mortality. Thus, whether only bouts or total accumulated MVPA is more beneficial to mortality remains uncertain.”

The authors add: “This prospective study examined the relative benefits of bouted versus sporadic MVPA on mortality in a representative sample of US adults, using an objective measure of physical activity. Greater total MVPA was strongly associated with lower mortality, and bouted activity conferred little additional benefit. Thus, these results provide evidence that mortality risk reductions associated with MVPA are independent of how activity is accumulated. These results can inform the development of the second edition of the Physical Activity Guidelines for Americans and other recommendations.”

The conclusion: Despite the historical notion that physical activity needs to be performed for a minimum duration to elicit meaningful health benefits, we provide novel evidence that sporadic and bouted MVPA are similarly associated with substantially reduced mortality. This finding can inform future physical activity guidelines and guide clinical practice when advising individuals about the benefits of physical activity. Practitioners can promote either long single or multiple shorter episodes of activity in advising adults on how to progress toward 150 min/wk of MVPA. This flexibility may be particularly valuable for individuals who are among the least active and likely at greater risk for developing chronic conditions.”

Important information for well-run workplace wellness programs.

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