Brisk 22-minute walk could offset harmful effects of sitting, study suggests

Cycling 2+ hours weekly on top of that was the real bump in fitness. It's still the bare minimum a person should be doing, but it's nice to finally be able to sit comfortably after all these years.

First weeks were rough though - it felt as if I was morphing into something else - something with a higher lung capacity.

[1] https://www.npr.org/2023/10/03/1203173458/ted-radio-hour-lau...

With the dog, I walk for at least an hour a day, but maybe 20 minutes of that is brisk.

I have never been healthier than when I got to work by walking or biking.

I am currently on a 400+ day runstreak where i run around 20 minutes/day (what my lunch-hour allows).

The psychology behind the streak is that it is somewhat tough the first month, but after that there simply isn't enough reason to stop.

When it comes to health, I am not sure. Possible that I sleep better, at least I get more tired in the evenings.

I think I may get a cold a bit more often. But as someone else noted, my muscles are less tense, and that is throughout the body, not legs in particular.

After six months I added a light jog for a mile.

Six months after that I was well enough to start HIIT classes. Six months after that I was strong enough to start real weight training and distance running.

Three years later I am down ~80lbs, able to run 10 miles at an 8:00 pace, and bench 205.

These aren’t extreme numbers for someone who started off reasonably healthy. But if you’ve been sedentary a long time, the difference in how you move and feel will be shocking.

Starting off can pose real challenges to your sense of self-worth, because you feel pathetic when you see how small your initial efforts are compared to what you see online and in media. It’s important to shift your mindset toward self-comparison, being slightly better than yourself yesterday.

If you’re struggling because you have chosen other priorities over your body (e.g. coding, family) in your 20s, I promise you, you will get there with consistent effort and compounded effort over time.

For the most part people know what's healthy, it's somewhere in between being a marathon runner or powerlifter and being obese.

I feel that someone who seeks to optimise their exercise in this way is kind of missing the point. The healthiest older people I know don't metricise everything, they just incorporate things like hikes, generally walking, eating proper food etc into their lives.

But how do we know this destined-to-die cohort will change that destiny by merely pretending to be the other group insofar as walking >=22 mins?

There still need to be flex and balance training introduced. So much workout...

Last year I decided to lose weight (I lost 35kg / 70 pounds in 9 months). During that time, I also decided to start running. This year, once my weight stabilised, I started getting huge improvements in running performance (probably from not being on huge calorie deficit anymore). Little did I know, I completely outpaced my body's ability to strengthen tendons and got pretty serious injury in my foot.

I could not run for almost 2 months. Once I could walk (but not yet run) I started doing A LOT of walking. I got up to 2-3.5h of brisk walk (about 27k steps / 22km) every day and stayed there for a month.

When I started running again, I have noticed not only I did not lose any of my improvements, I actually was way ahead of where I would be if I kept running. It was as if my running performance kept steadily improving at a fast pace even with me doing no running.

I now use walking as part of my regular training and I regularly trade some walking volume into running or back, depending on situation. I had enormous running performance improvement (as measured by my ability to run fast and long at a specific low heart rate) and I attribute it to a large degree to high volume of walks (averaged 29k steps for the past 6 months, this includes running).

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As to the topic of the submission, it is no wonder that walking offsets bad effects of sitting. For example, bad effects of sitting on our health include things like increased insulin resistance (this happens when you spend a long time not moving after a meal). When you go for a walk after a meal your muscles start consuming way more energy than when you are at your basal metabolic rate, not moving. This additional requirement for energy helps remove sugar from your bloodstream. This for your body is as if it was more sensitive to insulin -- it needs less insulin for a shorter time to achieve the same effect. And in fact muscle working IS more sensitive to insulin as it opens itself up to receive much needed energy sources.

Also training at low intensity (brisk walk for most people) is what athletes use to improve their mitochondria to improve their aerobic capacity. VO2.max has been found to correlate with longevity much more than even diabetes, smoking or even some cancers. It seems if you want to live long and healthy life you should strive to improve your mitochondrial health, aerobic capacity and low intensity aerobic activity that involves large parts of your body that you can do consistently every day, like walking, is the best way to achieve it.

I am now helping couple obese people help lose their weight. I asked them, rather than start running to just spend as much time as they can walking at a brisk pace. It carries much less injury risk. It is much easier to do consistently. It has much less overhead (you just walk out the door, no need to drive to gym). It is much more enjoyable and thus easier to stick to. It does not leave people in pain afterwards. And it has some additional utility -- you can walk places.

Our thought is if we can also build significant posture changes (sit-stand) more easily into the workday it can help a lot, and our first study showed this dramatically.

We just launched on Indiegogo here: https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/movably-pro-the-freedom-o...

Dedicating even 5 hours of your week for real vigorous activities will absolutely change your life. Is the baseline really "do just enough to not die of an heart attack before 50" ? So much wasted potential...

How much did this study cost? I could have saved them some money.

"Going for a brisk walk for just 22 minutes once a day may be enough to offset the negative health effects of sitting too much, research suggests."

Indeed, being active is natural and healthy. When will the next study show that being active is natural and healthy? I guess the recurrence of these articles can be the impetus for someone to break out of an inactive cycle, so commendable in that regard.