Any activity – even sleeping or standing – is better for your heart than sitting down, research suggests.
New evidence reinforces why sedentary behaviour is a killer and shows that just a few minutes of exercise per day could help slash the risk of heart disease and stroke.
Researchers suggested that swapping time spent sitting down for exercise led to better cholesterol levels, helps people stay a healthy weight and leads to a smaller waist circumference.
One of the wild things I accidentally discovered is that I was losing weight this year, and I had only made one real change: I stopped driving my truck to work.
I have a basic, but still kind of nice, F150. It’s easy. Just turn the key and go.
But now I ride a motorcycle to work, and on days it’s raining, or days when I’m running late, I have a Suzuki Samurai.
But those are all self-powered vehicles, right? What difference does that make?
Riding a motorcycle takes physical effort. You have to lean with it, you have to hover over the seat sometimes, you have to shift gears and hold on and look at everything around you.
Ok, but a Samurai is just a car, right? No. I can’t open the door and sit down. It has a six inch lift. I have to open the door and climb into it. It has 30" tires and no power steering. You have to constantly adjust the steering wheel to keep it between the lines. You have to turn it into corners, and turn it back out of the corner. It’s also a manual transmission, and you have to dance on the pedals to make a 1.3 liter engine pull the big tires. Its much more involved than “Turn key, shift into D, step on pedal”.