Can you use exercise to offset the health effects of sitting all day?
We know that sitting all day isn’t good for us, but what can we do about it? How much exercise do we need to offset the health risks of not moving our bodies for extended periods?
Unfortunately there’s no right answer to that question, as University of Alberta professor Billy Strean pointed out in a recent article. We need exercise - physical activity - to maintain our health. However, even getting 150 minutes of activity per week won’t offset the effects of sitting all day.
Think of it like smoking. If you are a tobacco user, it’s still in your interest to exercise - just like anyone else - to prevent your health from deteriorating. Yet, going for a run every morning isn’t going to cancel out the pack you polished off the day before.
The effects of sitting all day
“Metabolism slows down 90 per cent after 30 minutes of sitting. The enzymes that move the bad fat from your arteries to your muscles, where it can get burned off, slow down. The muscles in your lower body are turned off. And after two hours, good cholesterol drops 20 per cent. Just getting up for five minutes is going to get things going again,” said Gavin Bradley, director of Active Working.
In other words, the best way to protect yourself from the health effects of sitting all day is spending less time on your butt. If you’re like me, you probably need to sit in front of your computer many hours each day to do your job and there’s not much you can do to change that.
What you can do, though, is get up at least every half an hour and do anything. Yes, anything. Stretch, go to the bathroom, have some water, check the mail, do five squats. Just get up and move your body.
Almost everything we do that isn’t sitting, standing, or lying down is light physical activity, and our bodies need these activities throughout the day. The latest Canadian 24-Hour Movement Guidelines recommends “several hours” of light physical activity per day.
This makes perfect sense from a scientific perspective; our bodies evolved to move. Simply put, the sedentary lifestyles many of us lead are at odds with thousands of years of human evolution. RJ Burr, a chiropractor, summed this up perfectly: “Think about it: we used to dedicate full days to hunt for our next meal. Today we’re almost to the point where a pizza can be drop-shipped to your doorstep by a drone. The former is like the Iditarod (a famous dog sled race in Alaska), where the latter is equivalent to wiping your own behind. The physical exertion required is the difference between player versus spectator at a sporting event.”
With this in mind, it’s easy to see how sitting all day can increase our risk for mental health issues, diabetes, cancer, all-cause mortality, obesity, cardiovascular disease, neck pain, back issues, muscle loss, deep vein thrombosis, and many other conditions.
Building movement into your day
The message here is to break up periods of sitting with light or moderate physical activity, something we call “activity snacks.” We even have a guide for being active when you don’t have time that contains plenty of easy and actionable tips on how to build more movement into your day.
Sedentary behaviour is the new smoking and it’s important for us to recognize the enormous impact it’s having on our society and health system; physical inactivity costs our economy $29 billion annually.
If we can get even one-in-ten inactive Canadians to build a healthy level movement into their lives - something we can easily accomplish by supporting them through GoGetFit - we can grow our GDP by $1.6 billion, while also saving $2.6 billion in health care costs.
So, now that you’re done this article it’s time to stand up, maybe reach for your toes, and stretch your legs for a minute or two. I know I’m due too!
