Arm exercise while sitting boosts health

A LEICESTER-based scientific study shows breaking up prolonged bouts of sitting with short spurts of simple arm exercises can help reduce blood sugar levels.

It offers new hope to obese people at high risk of type 2 diabetes who have mobility difficulties.

Further research will now be needed to determine exactly how much upper body activity is needed to gain the most benefit.

The study was conducted at the NIHR Leicester Biomedical Research Centre, a partnership between Leicester’s hospitals, the University of Leicester and Loughborough University with findings published in the journal Diabetes, Obesity and Metabolism.

The research examined the blood sugar levels of participants after meals in two conditions - during prolonged sitting, and sit- ting that was interrupted regularly with five-minute bursts of upper-body exercises using tabletop arm cranks, every 30 minutes.

The authors found that blood sugar levels after meals reduced by about 57% when participants completed the exercises, compared to levels when meals were followed by inactivity.

These findings have the potential to assist in more situations such as workers who are desk- bound most of the day, people using wheelchairs or those with lower-body problems or injuries.

Dr Thomas Yates, one of the researchers, said: “This is a great proof-of-concept study. What will be interesting in the future is to see how many times during the day participants would need to interrupt their sitting with upper body exercises to get the greatest benefits in terms of reducing their blood sugar levels after eating.”