The Low-Down on Sitting
If you do any Google search on the health benefits of sitting, there are none to be found. Instead, you will find titles such as, “Sitting is the New Smoking,” or “The Sitting Disease.” To be clear, they are talking about excessive amounts of time on your backside without many moving breaks. Based on how humans have evolved, being upright and walking is the most advantageous state of a healthy body. It stands to reason that sitting for more than 8 hours a day would be bad for you mentally and physically.
The negative health effects increase the propensity for serious illness and disease such as Type 2 diabetes, some types of cancer, and high blood pressure. Physically, one’s muscles and skeleton maladapt to an ongoing sitting situation with general to acute discomfort, slower metabolism, and reduced blood flow. One of the most common areas of pain emanate from the sciatica and lower back because of poor posture and weakened core abdominal muscles.
Even runners, who by all appearances would seem fit, lower their health report card if they spend the rest of their full-time work week sitting. In fact, it may be the sitting, not the running, that increases the chances of injury because of something called adaptive muscle shortening. It is when muscles and connective tissue become tight by remaining in a shortened position over a prolonged period of time. These imbalances happen so gradually you may not notice at first, except for the stiffness you may feel in your back. The prime zones for problems are abdominals, lower back, and hip flexors - particularly the psoas, which activates during the repetitive knee lifting runners must perform during the gait cycle. Muscles shorten to the length they are being used. Too much sitting creates a muscle memory that doesn’t just disappear when you lace up your running shoes.
The cure, of course, is to not be sitting all the time, and there are ways to mitigate the negative effects of sedentary jobs. First, is to make it a priority to get up or enact a brief stretching session at least every thirty minutes, even if it’s just to walk to the end of the hallway or around your desk. Be sure to dedicate a portion of the lunch break to active movement, preferably outside, for fresh air and a change in environment. Create situations where you need to walk, such as parking further from your workplace or taking the stairs. Many businesses recognize the toll that sitting takes on employee health and will allow ergonomic chairs or adjustable standing desks.
For those who are weekend warriors, the burst of condensed activity makes you more prone to injury if you are sedentary the other five days of the week so make a routine effort to spread it out with activities before or after work. In the book, The Blue Zones, author Dan Buettner travels to places where people seem to live longer than average to find out their secrets for a long and healthy life. One of the common threads he sees throughout the diverse communities is that the people are physically active all day, whether constantly navigating the hilly terrain of their town, making food from scratch, tending gardens, joining community fitness classes, or simply walking everywhere.
It doesn’t seem to matter if people live in the city or countryside, as long as there is some kind of active movement imbedded in daily life. Does it have to be strenuous and feel like suffering? Not necessarily. It depends on your fitness goals. It should be purposeful, however, in that when you wake up in the morning, you know the plan of action for the day. As increasing numbers of jobs become desk bound and data based, so will the need to create a better work-body balance. For many retirees, they have already discovered the joys of walking in Victoria, the Garden City, so perhaps in time, we too, will become a blue zone on the world map.