Incidental activity can reduce our risk of cardiovascular disease and even death. You can try some simple forms of it in a meeting, on a flight or while reading this article.

It can be easy to spend an entire day sitting. First at your desk at work, then perhaps in your car, followed by a couple of hours on the sofa. Before you know it, you’re having dinner and realise you haven’t exercised all day.

Many global studies have found that a sedentary lifestyle can increase the risk of serious health conditions. Everything we can do to decrease sedentary time therefore benefits our overall health. But it can be challenging to find the time.

That’s where incidental exercise comes in. This is the moving around we do outside of deliberate exercise. It’s also known as “non-exercise activity thermogenesis”, or NEAT. This refers to any energy we use for movement that isn’t sleeping, eating or deliberate exercise, says Anantha Narayanan, a research fellow at the Auckland University of Technology in New Zealand.

Incidental exercise can be as simple as tapping your leg when you are sitting down or doing the washing up. “Smaller movements like shifting posture, rolling the shoulders or flexing the feet count too,” says Narayanan.