Sitting down too much is doing more harm to your body than you can imagine

'Did you get that email I sent you?'

Ahhhhhh~ No. Please don't.

There's plenty of good advice on this article, but be careful that the things that you do for yourself don't negatively impact other people; that's not be healthy, its being thoughtless and selfish.

Much as people like to check their Inbox first thing to get it out of the way before starting productive work, I find that getting my walk in the morning before I have breakfast and sit down to start work ensures that it happens. If I tried to fit it in late in the day, I know that a long debug session or support email thread with a customer will easily derail it.

Organised activity is also good for making me stick to schedules. I took up Kendo about 18 months ago, and the regularly scheduled classes and training sessions are good for forcing me off the computer and go work up a sweat. I especially love the little 30 second meditation we do at the start and end of each class. The purpose of the starting meditation is to put aside all our normal work/life/personal worries and stresses, and focus on the sport, then the end meditation is to bring them all back again.

Kudos to the creator (OP). Looks to be a very well-done (if click-baity, but hey, that’s how you....well....kind of...get clicks these days) project, and it comes across very much like many of the larger content creators.

Care to share some background on the project? Looks like you launched pretty recently. Goals? Am I correct in my assumptions here?

I wish our brains could keep this bad, guilty-like feeling that makes us take action around for longer.

- I work with computers so sitting or standing a large portion of time is inevitable.

- Is the real problem sitting/standing, or being unfit? If I don't get fat and if I keep fit, will I be ok? Or will sitting still harm me?

- If the claim is that sitting still harms me, how robust is the science here? Do they control for the above? If sitting, as opposed to poor fitness is the problem, does regular movement help? or are we just doomed to this if we use computers?

The article isn't about exercising once or twice a day though. It's about you sitting around too much during the day. Not regularly being even minorly active, no?

Perhaps I'm mistaken but it seems like the people talking about their once or twice a day exercise arent on the same page as the article.

I wish more articles and news outlets would do this. If journalist are going to critique something or show that its problematic I really appreciate it when they give me enough data to go explore and discover more on my own and when they also give me something actionable (preferably based on a body of research itself) which I can do to solve the issue / problem.

The movement also helps me maintain energy levels during long periods of working, which can lull if I'm sedentary. I even find maintaining 'flow' perfectly attainable (provided that your mind stays on work between the breaks, and you don't check things like e-mails). I see the Pomodoro break more as a physical break from sitting, with the option of taking a mental break from work if I think it's necessary.

Awesome so now I have no choice but to get immediately dropped out of my zone to answer your question. Go for your walk but go back to your desk and send me your message so I can add it to my queue of other questions that I'll get to once I've debugged this block.

I get up and do stretches and exercises every time it tells me to take a break. I set it for every 11 minutes, but it seems like the breaks are further apart than that. There were noticeable improvements within a week.

- I don't have a desk or chair. I have a bar table and a stool. This makes a huge difference. I get uncomfortable sitting on the stool after about 30 minutes, so I get off. Then I'll stand at the bar table and work for an hour or two. When I get tired of that, I'll spend a minute or two doing a physical activity (see below).

- I try to work from different physical places, e.g., cafes, different places in the house when nobody is home, the steps outside, the floor, the hammock hanging by the lake. I make it a game to come up with new and novel places to work from that don't require a lot of travel time (unless I'm walking—then it's well-spent travel time), anything to change the physical position of my body while working (and hopefully something that gets uncomfortable within an hour so I'm pushed to change again).

- I have a sandbag next to the bar table that I'll pick up at random times throughout the day and do squats, deadlifts, bent-over rows, or just carry the 60lb thing up the stairs or out around the yard once. I'll also use it as a weight to hold my feet while I do sit-ups. I have a pull-up bar hanging between two trees outside.

- I don't watch TV. In fact, I try to avoid anything that involves the sitting position. If I have to sit, I prefer the floor, or if I'm watching a movie or reading a book, I prefer laying down. If it's something for a few minutes and I can stand, I'll stand.

I've been doing this for about a year now and it's the best I've ever felt while working this much. What I'd like to start mixing in are some runs or long walks, but right now it's a choice between those or getting sufficient sleep. I prioritize sleep.

It’s cheaper than a gym, needs little space, elevates my heart rate more than running ever did, and there are tricks to learn to keep it fresh and progressively raise the difficulty (double-unders, cross-overs etc.).

Typically you don't stand still at a standing desk. Your legs will naturally want to move and stretch and since you're already standing, you can do this without really being disturbed.

Also, it sounds funny but walking and even running is a nice "break" from standing. It gives you more energy. I tend to break up my day with 2-3x ~2 mile walks.

There's other big wins too like much improved posture (especially if you were like me and sat in crazy positions).

If anyone wants to try out a standing desk without investing hundreds of dollars on an adjustable one I wrote a guide on how to build a custom standing desk to fit your desk[0] (without needing a saw):

[0]: https://nickjanetakis.com/blog/build-a-home-made-standing-de...

With all due respect, where is the source? The problem is that it is very difficult to prove this scientifically. It is plausible that people who exercise more do other things which increase their health, such as smoke less or not at all, drink less or not at all, eat more healthy, are more content in life, are more rich or more educated, etc.

https://www.runnersworld.com/sweat-science/standing-all-day-...

And so is lying down in bed :)

https://www.scienceabc.com/humans/why-is-it-a-bad-idea-to-st...

Oh, and what about running

https://www.active.com/health/articles/why-too-much-running-...

https://www.runnersworld.com/runners-knee

It seems the best is normal movement and walking, and taking breaks.

Too much of anything is bad. But perhaps generalizations like this lead to a lot of sensationalism.

Here's another one. Are you better off staying in or heading out for a while every day?

Staying in:

https://www.healthline.com/nutrition/vitamin-d-deficiency-sy...

https://www.vitamindwiki.com/Suicide+associated+with+low+vit...

Going out:

http://www.cancerresearchuk.org/about-cancer/causes-of-cance...

http://www.youbeauty.com/beauty/sun-and-acne/

It is like those studies in the past which said wine is good for the heart ... wait it's not good ... wait a small amount is good and too much is bad.

http://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/heart-disease/...

It seems we can't win...

I'd say too much of either is a bad thing, best thing to do is have a healthy balance of both then lead an active lifestyle outside of the office!

http://www.gocomics.com/pearlsbeforeswine/2017/09/27

This is complete garbage. The fact is, there is nothing you do to do 100% reverse the effects of sitting all day. You can maybe improve things by 20% or something like that. Progressive people keep hoping that you can use some kind of technology to change things but you can't. Standing desks don't do anything, standing up every hour doesn't do anything. There is nothing you can do. We are designed a certain way and if we don't live that way our health suffers greatly. The only solution is to go back to living that way no matter how hard you try to believe anything else.

What about walking around for 5 mins after every pomodoro. Is it still considered "too much sitting" ?

Yet in just a few months I feel my posture improving since I started psychotherapy and somatic experiencing therapy for trauma. Along with that I go to yoga once or twice a week. It's importnat to note here because I see the cogs spinning already... I actually did yoga years ago and did not notice the same effects. Therapy has been key to the changes I've observed in my posture.

My conclusion is a lot of bodily tensions are connected with unresolved emotional charges. This is related to the nervous system at some level.

My point is that posture, and general routine is symptomatic of your general emotional wellbeing.

As with all things in life, moderation is the key. Just doing a 1h30 yoga class once a week will probably offset much of the problems mentioned in the article.

I mean, I've sat at a computer (both for passion and work) for the past twenty years and have NEVER been fat. In fact I was underweight due to anxiety. I put on some weight in the gym in my early thirties which 70% have stayed without doing any regular exercise (which further confirms a health issue symptomatic of emotional / nervous system troubles affecting appetite).

I suspect that improving posture and making an effort to keep a good posture goes a long way also to offset the problems of sitting.

Don't get me wrong.. I can see in yoga class that sitting a lot has made muscles between inner thigh and pelvis very tight, as well as all the front making it diffuclt to stretch in various postures.

The problem here is assuming that N hours spent sitting equal N equivalent "damage". But that's not how our body works. It may be that you only need a good gym or yoga session just once a week to offset much of the problem. Not that it "undoes" the damage; but rather seeps into the rest of the week with more tonus in posture, and more postural awareness.

TLDR: context. Nobody gets fat because of sitting. If weight is really an issue I would suggest to seek therapy or if you feel that is not needed, try yoga or massage. Anything that takes you out of the left hemisphere's imbalance (cf. "The Divided Brain" by Iaian McGilchrist), and nurture more being in direct contact with the body, sensations, breathing.. as well as being more connected with others outside of intellectual activities. Surprisingly a lot of people think that "socializing" means talking. No, to be truly with others around you, is to be able to be there instead of taking refuge in the mind. That means to be at home in your body and how it feels. It's a journey.. it doesn't need to be taken in a couple days ;)

It has nothing to do with the stated concern based on the cited research whatsoever at all.

The issues raised here refer to base level physical activity and its influence on things like triglyceride and cholesterol behaviors. And the repeating pattern is that even small activities, like moving around to get a drink, or just standing, literally doing nothing else, raise you into the threshold where your body is "normal" in how it deals with these things.

Sitting, however, seems to be an outlier, allowing a degradation of these processes. Well guess what? Exercising once a day even won't change that, as the response time is quick. SO this isn't about you being a bike commuter, a rock climber, or a swimmer. It's about sitting specifically. It's about mounting evidence that our bodies evolved to expect constant muscular activity even at low levels and the near zero that happens during sitting is an outlier.

You know, sitting is fairly unusual. In many areas of the world, both ancient and modern, people don't really sit. They squat, or stand, or shuffle around, but full on sitting is uncommon for a lot of people. I betcha the ol' asian/slavic squat activates enough muscles to not count as sitting.

In one of the papers they even concede that heavy fidgeting might be enough to breach the threshold.

So really what we're talking about is getting out of your chair, moving around, all the time if possible. Yeah that's hard for a programmer. Plus you can't ignore even very current research showing that standing itself, is harmful when doing it too much (for totally unrelated reasons.) So standing desks are a bad plan too.

You know, I can't sit that long. I am not too worried about this for me. I shift around too much. Stand and wander in thought, get drinks, go to the bathroom, slide off my chair and kneel at the desk. Grab the tablet and flop around all over the house (I WFH 100%.) I go crazy staying at the desk constantly, for work anyway. Let's not talk about leisure time :)

But upon reviewing a number of these studies, this is apparently exactly what's needed. Standing 1 minute every hour isn't a enough, no. But it's the right direction. The problem mainly being that sitting in a chair requires little to no physical effort at all whatsoever. That's the issue.

Exercising 2, 3, 5 days a week, 1-2-3 hours? Doesn't matter. Don't confuse the two issues.

That said, I bet those goofy desk bicycling things you put by your chair would do the trick, assuming they actually require some level of effort.