What to do during a Pomodoro break

This is the weak point of the whole technique. The focus block takes care of itself. The break is where it falls apart, because “break” is not an instruction. So here is every common option, ranked, with what the research does and does not support behind each. You can use all of this without installing anything. The PomoFit timer exists because of what is at number one, and we will make that case there rather than here.

One thing first. The 25/5 split is not a scientific finding. Cirillo picked 25 minutes in the late 1980s with a tomato-shaped kitchen timer, and there are only about four peer-reviewed studies of the technique in existence. A 2025 randomised trial of 94 students found strict 25/5 produced no better productivity, task completion or flow than letting people choose their own breaks, and the Pomodoro group tired faster (Smits et al. 2025). Five minutes is a convention. Not a sacred one.

How we are ranking these

Three questions, in order.

Does it get you out of the chair? This is the one that separates the list. The largest effects on your body come from stopping sitting. The effects on energy and fatigue come from stopping working. Getting out of the chair is the only option that buys both.

Is there evidence it does anything? Specifically for energy, fatigue, mood or physical discomfort. Those are the outcomes with real support behind them.

Does it end on time? A break that eats twenty minutes is not a break, it is an unplanned lunch.

One thing is not on the list of benefits: getting smarter. A meta-analysis of micro-breaks found the performance effect was not statistically significant, and for cognitively demanding tasks effectively zero, while vigour and fatigue improved clearly (Albulescu et al. 2022). A review of 113 studies found acute exercise has only a small effect on cognition, with strong evidence of publication bias behind even that (Garrett et al. 2024). Energy, yes. Genius, no.

Here is the ranking, each option measured against those three questions.

1. Exercise snacks. Out of the chair: yes. Evidence supports fitness, adherence, and neck and shoulder pain. Ends on time: yes.

2. A walk. Out of the chair: yes. Evidence supports glucose, blood pressure, fatigue and mood. Ends on time: usually.

3. Nothing, away from the desk. Out of the chair: yes. Evidence supports vigour and fatigue (micro-breaks generally). Ends on time: usually.

4. Stretching. Out of the chair: only if you stand. Evidence supports little. Stretching was no better than nothing (Chen 2018). Ends on time: yes.

5. Coffee. Out of the chair: if you walk for it. Nothing measured. Ends on time: depends on the kitchen.

6. Breathing exercises. Out of the chair: no. Nothing we would cite here. Ends on time: yes.

7. Your phone. Out of the chair: no. Nothing. Ends on time: rarely.

7. Your phone

Worst option, and the default one.

We are not going to invent a study saying scrolling is destroying you. The case is simpler. You stay seated. Your eyes stay on a screen at the same distance they have been all morning. Your posture does not change. And the phone is the one item on this list with no natural end, so five minutes becomes fifteen and you feel worse about the afternoon than when you started.

It fails all three questions.

6. Breathing exercises

Popular, harmless, and we cannot back it up.

For the outcomes that matter across a desk worker’s day, fatigue, mood, stiffness, the good trials are all about movement. If a minute of box breathing settles you before a hard conversation, do it. It costs nothing. It just leaves you in the chair, which is the thing the rest of this list is trying to fix.

Ranked above the phone only because it ends when you decide it ends.

5. Coffee

Coffee is fine. Coffee is not a break.

If you make a cup and drink it at your desk while reading Slack, you did not take a break, you took a beverage. If you walk to the kitchen, wait for the kettle and look out of a window, you took a two-minute walking break with a drink attached. That is a reasonable use of five minutes. The ranking depends entirely on where your kettle is.

4. Stretching at your desk

Here is the finding most people do not want.

A review of 27 randomised controlled trials asked what reduces neck and shoulder pain in office workers. Strengthening exercise worked, with moderate-quality evidence. Stretching was no better than not stretching. Ergonomic changes alone did not work, and education alone did not work (Chen et al. 2018). Twenty-seven trials is a lot of trials. If stretching prevented desk-related neck pain, that review would have found it.

This does not make stretching bad. It feels good, and that is a real reason to do things. But be clear about what is not doing the work: across 27 trials, stretching was no better than not stretching. If you stand up to stretch, at least you stood up, though no trial has isolated that. If your neck genuinely hurts, the evidence points at strengthening, which is why back pain desk relief is built from loaded movements rather than neck rolls.

3. Doing nothing, away from the desk

Underrated, and the easiest thing here to actually do.

Stand up. Leave the room. Look at something more than six metres away. Do not take your phone. This is roughly what the micro-break literature measures when it finds breaks of ten minutes or less significantly raise vigour and reduce fatigue across 22 samples and 2,335 people (Albulescu et al. 2022). You do not have to earn a break by making it productive.

One wrinkle. In a study of 87 students, people taking scheduled breaks reported mood benefits while those left to self-regulate ended up more fatigued and more distracted, even though task completion did not differ (Biwer et al. 2023). The scheduling is worth more than the content.

2. A walk

A small Columbia study put 11 adults through eight hours of sitting under five break schedules. Only one dose moved glucose significantly: five minutes of walking every half hour, which cut the post-meal spike by 58%. Every dose lowered systolic blood pressure by 4 to 5 mmHg, and every dose except one minute every hour reduced fatigue and improved mood (Duran et al. 2023). Eleven people is not many, so hold those figures loosely. A meta-analysis of 13 crossover trials found breaking up sitting at least every 30 minutes beat less frequent breaks, though only for glucose, with the overall evidence rated low quality (Yin et al. 2024).

Note what is missing. None of those studies found any improvement in memory or executive function. Walking is excellent. It is not a nootropic.

Five minutes of walking is a completely defensible break. If that is all you ever do, you are doing fine.

1. Exercise snacks

Best option, and only slightly harder than a walk.

An exercise snack is a short bout of effort, under five minutes, done a few times a day. It is the established term in the research and the coverage of it, and it means what it sounds like. Ten squats. A flight of stairs. Eight push-ups against the desk edge. None of this is deskercise, and nobody is asking you to do seated shoulder rolls with a mug in your hand.

A 2025 meta-analysis in the British Journal of Sports Medicine pooled 11 trials of 414 inactive adults doing bouts of five minutes or less, at least twice a day, over 4 to 12 weeks. Cardiorespiratory fitness significantly improved, with moderate certainty, at 91% adherence and 83% retention. It also found no significant effect on body composition, blood pressure or blood lipids, and you should know that going in (Ahmed et al. 2025). Elsewhere, three vigorous stair-climbing bouts a day, three days a week for six weeks, improved fitness and peak power in sedentary young adults (Jenkins et al. 2019). And in 25,241 UK Biobank participants who did no formal exercise at all, roughly three minutes a day of vigorous incidental activity was associated with 38 to 40% lower all-cause mortality (Stamatakis et al. 2022). That last one is observational. An association, not a cause. It earns its place only because the association is so large.

It ranks first not because it beats walking on any single measure, but because it does what walking does and also loads muscle. That is what the Chen review found helps desk-worker neck and shoulder pain, and it is the half of the WHO guidelines almost every knowledge worker ignores. Two strengthening sessions a week is the ask. Sixty seconds of squats, eight times a day, quietly gets you there.

The five-minute routine, move by move

No equipment. No mat. Roughly one square metre.

• 0:00 to 0:30. Stand up. Walk to the far end of the room and back.

• 0:30 to 1:15. Fifteen air squats. Slow. Chest up, weight in your heels, as deep as your knees are happy with.

• 1:15 to 1:45. Walk. Shake out your legs. Refill your water.

• 1:45 to 2:30. Ten push-ups. Floor if you can. Hands on the desk edge if you cannot. Against a wall if the desk is too low.

• 2:30 to 3:00. Walk again. Roll your shoulders back a few times, for comfort, not for your neck.

• 3:00 to 3:45. Twenty reverse lunges, ten each leg. Hold the desk for balance.

• 3:45 to 4:15. Thirty seconds of calf raises, or one flight of stairs if you have stairs.

• 4:15 to 4:45. Stand still. Look at something more than six metres away.

• 4:45 to 5:00. Sit down. Start the next block.

Scale it down without guilt. If fifteen squats is too many, do eight. Adherence is the point of this format: 91% in the meta-analysis above, 87% in a separate trial of nine-minute bodyweight circuits (Fyfe et al. 2022). Short and repeatable beats hard and abandoned.

The sixty-second version, for when five minutes is not available: stand up, ten air squats, eight desk push-ups, sit down. Since 2018 the US Physical Activity Guidelines have counted activity of any duration toward your weekly total. The ten-minute minimum is gone, which means a minute genuinely counts.

If you remember one thing

Get out of the chair and make a muscle work for about a minute. That is the answer. Everything above is commentary on it.

The hard part was never knowing what to do. It is that at 3:47pm, tired and mid-ticket, nobody decides to do squats. The decision has to already be made. That is the real job of the break: to arrive with an instruction attached instead of five blank minutes.

If you want that decision made for you, PomoFit is a Pomodoro timer with exercise breaks that puts one named movement on screen when the block ends. Run a session in the browser without an account, or take a ready-made plan like energy boost cardio for the afternoon slump or weekly brain fog killer. If you would rather skip the Pomodoro structure entirely, an exercise snack timer does the movement half on its own.

Or set a phone alarm for every half hour and do ten squats. That works too. For how often, see how often you should get up from your desk.