Movement breaks help in ways exercise alone can't.
Even regular exercisers spend most of their day sitting. Research shows that movement breaks during the workday improve blood pressure, mood, energy, and post-meal glucose in ways exercise alone doesn't fully cover — these are separate physiological systems. A morning workout is great. So is a 3-minute break every hour.
Exercise Breaks is a free Android app that reminds you to take a 3-minute movement break roughly every hour during your workday. That's it. No streaks, no nagging, no guilt mechanics, no ads.
When the reminder appears, you stand up and move for three minutes. Walk around, stretch, do a few squats — whatever fits your body and your space. Then you sit back down and keep working. The app records that you took the break and gets out of the way.
Two scheduling modes: Quick Start runs from when you tap Start, useful for one-off long sitting sessions. Work Day runs on a fixed daily schedule with configurable hours and lunch break. Both let you adjust the interval between 45 and 75 minutes and the break duration between 3 and 10 minutes.
No account, no tracking. Everything you do in the app stays on your device. Optional tips and review prompts go through Google Play.
Most office workers sit for the better part of eight hours a day. Many of those workers also exercise — a morning run, a gym session, a lunchtime walk. The question this app is built around is whether that morning workout fully covers the cost of the eight hours of sitting that follows it, or whether something else happens during the workday itself that exercise can't reach.
The short answer the research supports is: mostly the workout helps, but not entirely. Some of what sitting does to the body shows up in physiological systems that respond to what's happening right now, not to what you did at 7 AM. For those systems, the useful intervention is interrupting the sitting itself.
That's what this app is — a reminder to interrupt sitting, every hour, for three minutes.
Four outcomes have been studied in office workers taking short hourly movement breaks. Each card below summarizes one; the full evidence and caveats are in the summary.
Across a 2023 dose-response trial and a 2026 twelve-week trial, every break schedule tested produced a measurable drop in systolic blood pressure of roughly 3 to 5 mm Hg. The effect shows up at the lowest doses tested and is in the range of what blood pressure medication or several months of regular aerobic exercise produce.
Three minutes of movement every hour reduces fatigue and improves mood compared to uninterrupted sitting. In a twelve-week trial of office workers, the largest effect in the study was on afternoon fatigue. These outcomes are self-reported, which matters — but the direction is consistent across trials.
Hourly breaks improve glucose markers over weeks even though shorter intervals (every 20 to 30 minutes) have stronger evidence on a single-day acute basis. The app's hourly default is a compromise between research support and what most desk workers can sustain.
A pooled analysis of 130,000 adults across six prospective cohorts is the source of the often-cited "3 minutes of activity per hour of sitting" framing. The data is associational rather than causal — it can describe a pattern across populations but can't prove the breaks themselves cause the effect.
Some stronger claims circulate in this space. None are defensible against a careful reader, and none appear in the app or on this site.
The core Exercise Breaks protocol will always be free. No ads. No feature paywall. The app is supported by optional user tips and, if needed later, by clearly-justified paid cloud features for users who want them.
If you find the app useful, you can support development with a tip from inside the app. There are several amounts to choose from. Tips are a small payment to the developer, not a charitable donation, and aren't tax-deductible.
The app collects no personal data, and there are no analytics and no third-party trackers. Everything you do in the app stays on your device. Optional tips and the occasional review prompt are handled by Google Play under Google's terms. The website you're reading has no analytics, no tracking, and no cookies.
Exercise Breaks ships on Android first. iOS is planned and coming after the Android launch is stable.
Want to be notified when it's available? Email hello@exercisebreaks.app with the subject "Notify me" and you'll get a single message when the app goes live. No newsletter, no follow-ups.