According to recent studies, the lack of whole-body muscular movement is strongly associated with obesity, abnormal glucose metabolism, diabetes, metabolic syndrome, cardiovascular disease risk and cancer.

In the study, the effects of sitting time were compared with the  inverse effects of physical exercise in a large group of Australian adults.  Each 1 hour increase in watching television increased the prevalence of the metabolic syndrome in women by 26%. To reverse the effects of this additional  hour, an extra 30 minutes of exercise would have to be performed.

Unfortunately, I couldn’t find any specific information on how many hours of sitting  are considered to be too many. It is easy to guess that the average office stint of 8-9 hours already has us well in the “too much” zone, without any additional TV or computer viewing thrown in. If I get my maths right, it would already take four hours of exercise to reverse the negative metabolic effects of our workday!

However, before you all give up your jobs and go and work the land, it is a good idea to use some common sense. Nobody is entirely sedentary in their job. It is mainly a matter of taking all opportunities to add movement into your day.  It really means doing all the things that were considered normal before we all got too busy, like taking the stairs, taking your breaks away from your desk, leaving the building at lunchtime (gasp!) etc., etc.

I’ll see you on the running trail where I have to go now for 30 minutes in order to reverse the effects of sitting and blogging!