“10 squats every 45 minutes beat a 30-minute walk for blood sugar control”

The trial behind this claim put 18 overweight and obese young men through four different days in random order: 8.5 hours of uninterrupted sitting, that same sitting broken by one 30-minute walk, broken by three minutes of walking every 45 minutes, or broken by three minutes of squatting every 45 minutes [1]. The breaks were matched for total effort, so no condition simply involved more work than another.

Blood sugar was tracked continuously and scored as the extra sugar that builds up in the blood after meals across the day. Compared with sitting still all day, the single 30-minute walk cut that build-up by about 10%, while the squat breaks and the walking breaks each cut it by about 23% [1]. Put the other way round, the squat breaks came out about 14% better than the single walk.

The researchers also recorded electrical activity in the leg muscles during each condition. Only greater activity in the quadriceps (the muscles at the front of the thigh) and the gluteal muscles (the buttocks) went with a smaller blood sugar rise, which fits the mechanism: those large muscles are the body's biggest destination for sugar pulled out of the blood [1].

Two other trials point the same way without singling out squats. In 14 healthy adults, one minute of repeated chair stands every 30 minutes lowered the insulin response after lunch as much as two-minute walking breaks did, although blood sugar itself did not differ between the conditions [2]. In 30 adults across a range of body weights, three minutes of body-weight resistance exercises every 30 minutes through an evening of sitting cut the after-meal blood sugar rise by about 31% compared with sitting still [3].

The head-to-head comparison rests on a single day in 18 young men in the overweight range, so it says nothing about women, older people, people with diabetes, or whether the benefit survives weeks of ordinary life. Squatting every 45 minutes at a desk job is also a harder habit to keep than it sounds.

So the useful part of the claim is real: spreading short bursts of leg work through the day beats saving the movement for one walk. The specific "10 squats" figure does not come from the research, and squats held no advantage over walking breaks of the same length.