New UK activity guidelines say every movement counts
The UK Chief Medical Officers say every movement counts. What the refresh changes, and the type 1 part it does not cover.
The UK Chief Medical Officers refreshed the national physical activity guidelines on 10 July 2026, and the headline message is deliberately permissive: every movement counts, and small amounts of activity are worth doing. The targets have not been rewritten. What has changed is the emphasis, away from “hit 150 minutes or it does not count” and toward “doing a little is meaningfully better than doing none”.
- The weekly target is unchanged: 150 minutes of moderate activity, plus strength and balance work, now stated for all age groups.
- The refresh leans on evidence for light activity and for cutting long stretches of sitting, not just formal exercise sessions.
- Nothing in it is type 1 specific. It is general population guidance, and it does not address glucose, hypos or insulin.
- The type 1 catch it does not mention: activity moves glucose. A low can happen during the activity or straight after, and again hours later, including overnight.
- Extra carbohydrate around activity is something you can manage yourself. Anything involving insulin is worked out with your diabetes team.
What the refresh actually says
The guidelines keep the familiar target of 150 minutes of moderate activity a week, alongside strength and balance work, and restate it across age groups rather than treating older adults as a separate case. The substantive shift is in what counts. The CMOs put more weight on light-intensity movement and on breaking up long periods of sitting, on the evidence that the largest single health gain comes from moving from doing nothing to doing something, rather than from an already-active person doing more.
Hence the campaign line: every movement counts. Walking to the shop, taking stairs, standing up during a long shift, carrying the washing upstairs. The point of the framing is that a person who cannot picture themselves doing three gym sessions a week is not therefore excluded from the benefit.
Why a low bar matters more when you have type 1
For most people the barrier to activity is time or motivation. With type 1 there is often a different one: the last time you exercised, you went low, or you spent the evening chasing a glucose level, or you woke at 3am treating a hypo you did not see coming. Once that has happened a few times, “I should exercise more” competes with a genuine, evidence-based worry, and the worry usually wins.
That is why guidance built around small, ordinary movement is worth noticing rather than skimming past. A ten minute walk carries far less glucose disruption than an hour of football, and it still counts toward the target now. For anyone whose relationship with exercise has been shaped by hypo fear, the refresh quietly widens the range of things that are both safe-feeling and officially worthwhile.
Worth being clear about what the guidance is not, though. It is written for the general population, and it says nothing about glucose, insulin timing, or how to handle activity when you are already high or have ketones. Those questions do not have a national answer. They have your answer, worked out with your team.
The part you have to fill in yourself
The main thing the guidelines cannot tell you is how your own body responds, and with type 1 that varies more than most people expect. Gentle steady activity usually pulls glucose down as muscles use it. Short intense efforts, or anything competitive enough to bring adrenaline into it, can push glucose up instead before it comes down later. Two activities that both count as exercise can therefore do opposite things to your reading.
The other gap is timing, and it runs in both directions. A low can arrive during the activity itself, or in the minutes just after you stop, which is when one is most likely and is the reason to carry fast-acting sugar even for something small. Glucose can then keep drifting down for hours afterwards too, because muscles carry on refilling their glucose stores, which is where overnight lows after an active day come from. None of this makes activity a bad idea, and the guidance is right that the benefits are substantial. It just means that for you the plan has two halves: the movement itself, which the guidelines cover, and how you and your team handle glucose around it, which they do not.
What changes how activity affects you
Two people doing the same thirty minute walk can see different results, and so can the same person on two different days. Insulin still active from a recent meal keeps working through the activity. Time of day matters, since evening activity carries more of its effect into the night. Intensity and nerves can turn an expected fall into a rise. This is why a general guideline stops at “move more” and the specifics get worked out from your own data.
What every movement counts looks like in practice
Examples, not instructions or doses.
You have avoided the gym since a bad hypo last spring, but you start walking to the shop instead of driving. Under the refreshed framing that is real, counted activity, and its effect on your glucose is far gentler and easier to learn than an hour of hard exercise would be.
You work seated most of the day. Standing and moving for a few minutes each hour is exactly the kind of thing the update emphasises, and it is small enough that it rarely produces the dramatic glucose swing that puts people off exercising at all.
A big walk on Saturday afternoon goes well and your glucose behaves. That night you drift low, because muscles are still restocking hours later. Nothing went wrong during the activity, and the effect simply arrived late.