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.
I started taking walks and took up longboarding after skyrocketing to my biggest weight ever, and I not only got down to a healthy weight range, but I actually feel like walking and standing more.
What articles like this rarely mention is that society itself won’t change, and you’ll start to notice how many things are centered around the idea that people will sit the entire time. I’m the weirdo who doesn’t socialize at lunch now because I’m using that chance to walk (I have a sedentary office job). I asked for a standing desk, and I was told no because “No one ever uses those.” My husband has started to join the fun, thankfully. Instead of binging movies and shows, we often go for a walk in the park. It’s so much better for the mood. I’ve noticed a marked improvement in our dogs, too.
I was using my lunches for walks but doing napkin math standing over 8 hours beat walking for one. I was lucky enough to get a standing desk and then I flipped the scrip and take a load off at lunch. Either way is good but boo to your work not giving you a standing desk. If you ever start being able to do it my advice is I like a permanent standing desk at just the right ergonomic height for keyboard and monitors up at eye level (eyes a bit more toward the top when looking straight ahead) and then have a chair that is barstool height so if I feel the need to sit I can go back to standing really easily (encourages more standing). The deskts that move up and down with standard chairs are the fad but if you go all the way down to sit you are much less likely to stand back up.
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”.
andy cap had it right. sic.
