Can you do 5-minutes of squats before your next meeting?
A five-minute break for squats in the office
You start the week with good intentions: this time, you’ll stay consistent. You’ll follow the plan. You’ll do the exercises your PT gave you. Easy, right?
Then work happens.
Meetings multiply. Emails expand. Your calendar starts playing Tetris with your time blocks. Before you know it, five days have passed and your workout plan is still sitting quietly in your diary—untouched, twice rescheduled, never crossed off.
And when you finally look up, it’s 3:53pm and you’re trying to remember if squatting furiously for five minutes counts as “muscle memory.”
This is the cycle so many of us fall into: sitting too long, losing energy, relying on caffeine, and putting off movement until there’s “time.”
But what if five minutes was all it took to start breaking that pattern?
That’s the idea behind this week’s Active Break Challenge:
Take five minutes before your next meeting to move, specifically, to squat.
No gym. No gear. Just a small shift toward the version of you that does the thing instead of moving it to next week’s calendar.
Fiona tried it. Here’s how it went.
The Squat Confession
Because nothing says ‘health routine’ like last-minute squats before your PT check-in.
Fiona checked the time. 3:53pm. Seven minutes.
Seven minutes until her next call, five minutes for an Active Break, two to catch her breath before launching into the next session. It wasn’t ideal, but it was...something.
She stood beside her office chair like a character in a crime drama, ready to confess.
Her crime? Not being quite as consistent with her "home exercises" as she'd said she would be.
Well. Better late than never. One hundred squats, here we go.
Her body protested. Her glutes whispered, we haven’t done this in days, and her left hip made an odd clicking sound she chose to ignore.
The week had gotten away from her. Again.
There hadn’t been a crisis. No emergency, no illness, no surprise deadlines. Just work.
Endless meetings. More spreadsheets. Post-meeting debriefs. Pre-meeting prep. She had written Do squats in her calendar. Twice. She had moved both entries.
Now she was here, frantically trying to make up for five sedentary days with five rushed minutes. Was this enough time to rewrite history?
She did a set of twenty. Then twenty more. Apparently, Fiona could only count in twenties now, five sets of twenty sounded structured, achievable. Fifty or a hundred felt like confessions.
This wasn’t a workout. This was damage control.
By set three, she’d entered that specific mental state reserved for people trying to cram a week of discipline into a tiny window of panic.
I’ll be consistent next week, she told herself. I promise I will be, Also a lie.
Her thighs burned. Her breath shortened. She checked the time and picked up the pace. She briefly considered giving up entirely but she had a week of missed squats to catch-up on.
At 3:59, Fiona clicked into the Zoom room, still flushed, still catching her breath. She had the faint glow of exertion, or was it guilt?
Next week, she promised herself, would be different.
Active Break Challenge: 5 Minutes of Squats Before Your Next Meeting
If you, like Fiona, have ever found yourself trying to cram a week's worth of exercise into the final five minutes before a personal training check-in, you're in good company. This week’s challenge is inspired by her last-minute emergency squat session.
Here’s the challenge:
Take five minutes before your next meeting to do squats.
As many squats as you can, up to 100, or until the timer runs out. Whichever comes first.
Why? Because sitting is sneaky. Because the day can run away from you before you know it. And because sometimes, the only thing standing between you and your goals is five intentional minutes.
Here’s how to start:
Step 1: Look at your workday and choose when you’ll do it.
Pick a meeting or moment in your day where five minutes is realistically doable. This challenge works best when it has a clear slot to live in—not just “when I have time.”Step 2: Schedule it and set an alert.
Add it to your calendar, set a phone reminder, or write yourself a visible note. Make it hard to ignore when the time comes.Step 3: When it’s time, make space. Push your chair back. Clear a little room. You don’t need gym clothes or a timer. Just a patch of floor and five minutes you were probably going to spend scrolling anyway.
Step 4: Start squatting.
Do what you can in five minutes. Rest when you need to. Aim to move, whether that’s 30 squats with breaks or a heroic dash to 100, the point is, you showed up. That’s how habits begin.
Try it once. Then try it again. You might be surprised what a five-minute squat break can do, especially when it becomes part of your day, not an eleventh-hour afterthought.
Why Bother? (The Benefits)
The quiet reality of modern work is that we sit, we scroll, we caffeinate. Exercise and fitness? Something we do outside of work and need to “find time for”.
But we might not find the time. Not unless we carve out the moment ourselves.
That’s where active breaks come in. Not as another chore to do or as productivity hacks. But as a gentle, physical reminder that there are active choices we can make during the workday to give our bodies a break from sitting.
Enter: the five-minute squat break.
It’s not about heroics. It’s not about hitting new personal bests. It’s about interrupting the inertia of your day, one rep at a time.
And of all the ways to move, squats make a statement.
They’re simple, yes, but they’re also demanding. They wake up your legs. They activate your muscles. They increase circulation.
We don’t need to be Arnie, who said ““I do squats until I fall over and pass out. So what? It’s not going to kill me. I wake up five minutes later and I’m OK.”. That’s not the five-minute break we’re aiming for.
But the power of the squat and movement still stands. As Tom Platz said “The squat is the king of all exercises.”
Even done beside a desk, squats wake the body up in a way scrolling never will.
A five-minute squat break can:
Shake off that afternoon fog without reaching for caffeine
Reclaim your posture from office-chair collapse
Send blood to the brain and signal "hey, we're alive!"
Boost energy without a single motivational quote
Make you feel just a little stronger than you did five minutes ago
A five-minute squat break won’t solve everything, but it can shift something. It interrupts the autopilot. It changes the rhythm. It might even change your day.
JOIN THE CHALLENGE
Have you ever started a new personal training programme full of good intentions, only to realise, days later, that you haven’t done a single exercise you promised you would?
Fiona gets it. The week filled up. The time slipped away. And suddenly, five minutes before her next meeting, she was frantically squatting beside her desk, hoping it would be enough to cover a week of missed squats.
That moment? That’s where this challenge begins.
Take five minutes before your next meeting to move and do some squats.
No overhauls. No gym. Just you, a patch of floor, and a chance to reset. Set a reminder. Block the time and spend 5-minutes moving instead of sitting.
Because breaking the sitting habit doesn’t start with a perfect plan. It’s small movement breaks, little and often.
Tried it? Let us know!
Tag #TheHourlyUprisingand share your experience. Squat counts, progress photos, motivational memes—we welcome it all.