Most people probably assume that the problem with a sedentary lifestyle is you Is not Moving (yes, I can see the totality there.) Every minute, every hour, while sitting at your desk or sitting on the sofa is when you are not walking, lifting heavy objects or running. It’s part of the problem with being sedentary, to be sure, and I’ll touch on that in this post. Although there is more to it than that.
Sitting behavior is defined as waking activity that produces less than 1.5 MET — sitting and lying down, basically. Experts acknowledge that controlling how much exercise a person will do, sitting behavior Per Bad for physical and mental health. In other words, even if you go to the gym and walk the dog regularly, sitting is harmful.
Sitting behavior is not just the absence of movement; It is Presence Something more deceptive
I’m sure I don’t need to tell you that sitting behavior is more common now than at any time in human history. Our grandparents were three times more likely to be moderately active, many of us used to sit in front of a computer to work (I say while typing on my laptop). Although our ancestors probably enjoyed much more leisure time than today’s average adult, their off-time time did not correspond to modern rest. While hanging out in the shade of a tree or sitting around a campfire, swapping long stories, they took a relaxed posture like the once ubiquitous deep squat. Their bodies were not cushioned and kept in a stable position by a comfortable sofa or la-z-boy. All the muscles in their body were activated, the tissues were stretched steadily. They often change their posture for comfort and balance.
In short, our ancestors rested, they enjoyed a lot of downtime, but we modern humans were not the way they used to be. Sitting behavior is a distinct health problem, a public health problem and an economic problem. The cost of medical care and loss of productivity due to overcrowded modern life has reached billions of dollars every year. Today I am going to outline some specific ways that sitting hurts us and what we can do about it.
Sitting increases the risk of disease and death
Data from large, long-term epidemiological studies tells a clear and consistent story: those who are more sedentary in their daily lives are at greater risk for almost every chronic disease. They too died early. It’s as simple as that… mostly. Some analyzes suggest that among the most active individuals, those who engage in moderate to vigorous physical activity for at least one hour a day have a reduced risk of colonization. I’ll come back to that exciting quest later. For everyone else, there is a clear link between sedentary behavior, chronic disease, and short lifespan.
For example, a 2012 meta-analysis of a study of about 800,000 combined participants found that The more you sit, the higher your risk of being attacked by a cardiovascular event, a suicide or death at a cardiovascular event. The researchers said that the “reported associations were largely independent of physical activity, which added weight to the notion of sedentary behavior. [sic] A unique behavior in one’s own right. “
The same meta-analysis was found There is a particularly strong link between sedation and the development of type 2 diabetesSuch as the 2015 meta-analysis study that similarly regulated the level of physical activity.
The Cancer Prevention Study II (CPS-II) Nutrition Cohort Study followed 127,000 adults over two decades and tracked all kinds of health outcomes. To understand the effect of sitting, the researchers compared people who sat for less than three hours a day at the beginning of the study who admitted to sitting for six or more hours a day. Controlling for variables such as alcohol use, smoking, diet, and chronic health problems, the researchers found that the sedentary group rate was higher:
“… Mortality due to all causes, cardiovascular disease (including coronary heart disease and stroke-specific mortality), cancer, diabetes, kidney disease, suicide, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, pneumonia due to solids and fluids, liver, peptic ulcer and other digestive diseases. ., Parkinson’s disease, Alzheimer’s disease, nervous system disorders, and muscular disorders. “
That’s quite a list. And again, these results remain after participants control how much moderate to vigorous physical activity they are experiencing.
The sedentary energy creates a surplus
One of the proposed mechanisms by which sedentary behavior increases the risk of disease is that it may be an energy surplus – eating more calories than you spend – which in turn leads to hyperglycemia, hyperinsulinemia and insulin resistance.
Of course, not everyone who sits eats too much. Researchers have found that people who do not eat more are protected from some of the negative consequences of sitting. At least in the short term, the answer seems to be yes. Sitting still carries risks, however Sit down Plus Overeating is especially dangerous. Probably a factor as to why they’re doing so poorly. Researchers have long known that TV time is more strongly associated with chronic disease and death than any other type of sedentary behavior. The current theory is that people are more likely to have a snack in front of the television than to read a book while driving or sitting.
There is another problem to consider here. When you are in a surplus of energy, you also lose the benefits of being on calories Deficit. In a new study, scientists at Howard University coined the term “cellular exercise” to describe the cellular adaptations that result from hermetic stress, you guessed it, calorie limitation. Sitting plus eating extra is equivalent to not getting the cellular exercise you need to improve.
That means you are not walking
I will not mention this point because I have often appreciated the convenience of walking on the blog. Suffice it to say that you should walk as much as possible, on as many different surfaces as possible. Walking is our birthright, and an essential as a bipedal primate.
If walking is not already part of your daily routine, it is number one priority. Start with these beginner walking routines.
Sitting changes your biomechanics
My friend Katie Bowman has been hammering in this house for years. Sitting and lying leaves long lasting and unwanted weights on some parts of the body, others are less used. This leads to all forms of unemployment. I’ll take Katie from here:
I will divide the seating problem into two sections. On the one hand, there is Silence. You’re not moving so all the systems in your body that rely on movement and gravitational load aren’t happening to make things flow.
But then there’s the second piece that I’d like to call Geometric problems. So it’s not just that you are stable; That is, when you are stable, you are always in the same position. You adapt to what you do most of the time and so there are all these changes in your body structure like your muscle length, some getting longer, some getting shorter. In the case of your bones, how much weight you have has less input, so your bone density adjusts accordingly.
You will (probably) miss the benefits of exercise
As I mentioned, exercise and sedentary behavior are separate structures. You can be high on both, low on both, or any combination of the two. So many studies try to control physical activity and get it out of the equation.
As I mentioned earlier, high levels of exercise negate some of the disadvantages of sitting, or perhaps seem unbalanced. The researchers conducted a meta-analysis of the longitudinal study (between 2 and 18 years of follow-up) covering more than one million adult subjects looking at the effect of sedentary behavior on the overall mortality rate. Here is what they found:
- Individuals who have done more than 35.5 MET hours of physical activity per week (moderate intensity physical activity of about 60 to 75 minutes per day or more), regardless of how much they sat during the day. Sitting for 8 hours every day was no different than sitting for less than 4 hours. Everyone in this group had a relatively low risk of death.
- The less exercise people do, the more it hurts to sit in an almost linear fashion. So far, the worst combination has been less exercise (just a few minutes of moderate exercise per day) and excessive sitting (more than 8 hours per day). Not surprising.
- When they watch, especially on TV, watching more than 5 hours a day, no matter how much exercise a person does, is associated with high mortality. As expected, though, the combination of inactivity and watching more television was particularly detrimental.
I’m not going to lie, I’m surprised to dig into these results. This high exercise-high seating group is a portrait of the “active couch potato” that I’ve long warned about. These are your hardcore gym going and endurance athletes who take a hard break after rigorous training — maybe too hard, I believe. This new information suggests that at least where public deaths are concerned, the pattern may not be as bad as it once was.
I’m willing to be wrong, but I’m still not completely impressed. At the end of the day, I always look at everything through a primitive, evolutionary lens, and that pattern still seems to represent an evolutionary discrepancy. It may be that the effects take longer to show or are seen in ways other than mortality.
I’m also thinking about the possibility of healthy user bias here. If you exercise 90 minutes and sit for 8 hours, it still gives you 14.5 hours for sleep and “other”. What happens next is important. I would say that these people dedicated to exercise are on average, perhaps more dedicated to other healthy exercises.
Nevertheless, these results indicate If you’ve been sitting on your buttocks for a third of your life, make sure you’re exercising better.
The solution
You know what I’m saying here: Sit less, move more.
Frankly, I still don’t support a lifestyle where you hit the gym for 90 minutes and then lie on the sofa all day. That way we are not designed to live, period. Lift heavy things, yes. Occasional sprints. Lots of walks. When you sit or lie down, get up and change your position frequently. Sprinkle microwout all day.
Make a concerted effort to move around in your workday. Create an active workstation. Give yourself different sitting, leaning and standing options. Sitting on different surfaces ম্ব long stools, backless benches, exercise balls দেয় gives different biomechanical stress. Everybody go and invest in an underdesk treadmill or bicycle.
I’m not saying don’t rest. Most people probably need more time to disconnect and recover from the pressures of the modern world than they currently have. I say don’t sit idly by for hours at a time. Instead of floping on the sofa after a long day at your desk and in your car, nurture and restore your rest and you will be better off for it.
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