Excessive Sitting Is Our Biggest Fitness Related Problem
Today’s Topic Highlights:
We sit too much. All of us. Whereas our ancestors lived constantly in motion, we now live constantly inert.
A recent study published in the European Heart Journal revealed that the average late middle aged adult spends 10.4 hours, roughly 2/3 of their waking life, sitting.
We need to return the body to its natural baseline state of general motion. Sitting is the default social norm for most common activities nowadays. Avoid the couch or chair as often as possible outside of work.
Get up every 20-30 minutes and move around. Do something. Anything. Stand up and do some arm circles. Walk around the room. Bend down and touch your toes. Dance. Be creative and find ways to move.
Stop following the cultural norm that condones hours of sitting in front of screens. Stay in motion and keep those joints lubricated. This has to be established first before any serious forms of strength training and cardio can enter the exercise conversation.
We sit too much. All of us. Advanced technology and modern culture have created an extremely unnatural environment that revolves around sitting most of the day. Whereas our ancestors lived constantly in motion, we now live constantly inert.
Dr. James Levine’s bombshell 2015 paper ‘Sick of Sitting’ was the first to raise widespread public awareness to the scale and consequences of our 21st century sitting habits. He wrote, “Environments foster sedentariness in many ways and at multiple societal levels. On an individual level, a person is confronted with environmental cues to sit throughout the day...”. The conditions we have set for our general environment is the root of our excessive sitting problem.
A recent study published in the European Heart Journal shed light on the statistical scope of our dilemma. Researchers collected data from special monitors worn by more than 15,000 participants for an entire week, which tracked their sleeping, standing, sitting, and general movement. The average age of the participants was 54, and 88% of them rated their health as “good or better”. The monitors revealed an average of 10+ hours per day spent sitting in comparison to less than 3 hours per day spent moving! With sleep subtracted from the equation and standing added to it, the study showed that we spend 2/3 of our waking existence on our rumps. 1
Gone are the days of adults taking long walks in the park for fun, riding bikes through town, raking leaves manually, and holding big neighborhood cookouts on the weekend. Gone are the days of kids breaking down the front door to run outside and play games, climb trees, puddle jump in the rain, wrestle, chase animals, get dirty, and finally return home just before dark (or not) with some cuts and bruises.
We now live in a time where indoor sedentary living is not only socially acceptable, it is the standard norm. Even on a beautiful sunny day! And our bodies are rapidly deteriorating as a result. Therefore, the first course of action to take in regards to daily exercise is to simply counteract this torpid tendency. In the most literal sense of the word, just get off the seat and MOVE.