Katy Bowman - Don't Just Sit There!

Study After Study Proves that Working Out Doesn’t Protect Against Chronic Pain or Disease Caused by an 8-Hour Sitting Day

Fancy yourself an athlete as you cycle through a 45-minute spin class or hit CrossFit 5 times a week? While we applaud your dedication to fitness, the genetically optimal physical challenges your body craves are not just the rote stuff like your daily walk or weekly session with a trainer, but spontaneous challenges that get your body moving in new and extraordinary ways. Humans evolved to participate in an assortment of daily movement and physical challenges. Unfortunately, the vast majority of humans aren't honoring this genetic requirement for varied physical movement. And being a fitness enthusiast, or even a serious competitive athlete, doesn’t give you a free pass here.

As breaking science has revealed with the active couch potato syndrome, even those who follow a devoted schedule of daily workouts are not free from the disease risk of sedentary living. By sedentary living we don’t mean just couches and potato chips. If the majority of your day is spent commuting and working a desk job, you also fall into the “sedentary risk” category, and your hour-long gym session isn’t doing much to protect you.

Even those with active jobs—for example, a lineman for the utility company, a building contractor, or a shipping and receiving agent—are generally engaged in repetitive tasks that only mobilize a fraction of their joints and muscles. Furthermore, the grind of physical labor (particularly when using inefficient mechanics) can lead to assorted overuse injuries and health problems.

The solution here is not more visits to the gym or more miles on the road, or even installing a standup desk and carrying on. Every little step away from sedentary helps, of course, but we need to mix things up a little—make that a lot—in daily life.

Help Is Here!
The good news is that, because we’ve all been sitting (static) the same way for decades, changing our static positioning (e.g., standing more) can indeed improve our health, as can moving intermittently throughout the day. It's important to nip your stillness issues in the bud, BUT…there's a right and wrong way to go about it. So, we brought in a movement expert.

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