Sedentary lifestyle. The harm of work sitting

Currently, the sedentary lifestyle is considered the great villain of our health. Being sedentary means not only not to do any physical sport, involves spending most of life, literally, sitting with virtually no movement.

Working life is the one to blame about this sedentary lifestyle, as most of the population work sitting and passes more than 8 hours a day in that position. Work sitting, without moving the body, brings harmful effects to our health such as increased cardiovascular disease, diabetes, and certain cancers

It is also proven that even doing 1 hour of exercise a day, the effects of this daily and continuous inactivity are not reversed. Obviously we should keep practicing physical exercise on a regular basis, but don’t count on it to replace the small active breaks you have to do constantly. In fact, only 60 minutes sitting in a chair without getting up, is already harmful, imagine what several hours in that position will do.

In most cases, it is not possible to make structural changes in the workplace, or change the profession, but you can start by changing your pace in the office, trying to get up more often.

The opinions are divided: some people indicate that every hour you should get up, some people say that you need to do it every 30 minutes. The certain thing is that you should not be more than 1 hour without moving. By moving we mean getting up, take some steps, even if they are in same place, or if possible make small exercises a few minutes, like stretching your hands to feet.

If you spend a lot of time on the couch watching television, get up at the time of advertising or pause what you’re watching and move. You can go to the kitchen, the bathroom, throw something in the trash, it doesn’t matter. If you sit down to play games or read, get up after some battles or some chapters. A few seconds up are enough to the harmful effects of low energy expenditure that occurs while sitting, are reversed.

Some suggest that buying a pedometer, that allows you to measure the amount of steps you take each day, to know whether it is necessary or not, to exercise more. Even if you do not reach the famous Japanese mark of 10 thousand steps daily, a guarantee to stay healthy, you can always have an exact idea of the amount of steps that you did and work from these data.

What is really important is to provide the body activity in a very regular basis, even if with a very short duration. It is enough for our body does not suffer much with the misdeeds of this inactivity.

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