Change your life in just one hour per day by building a business and plotting your exit from cubicle-land.
If you have a desk job that leaves you sitting all day–or you’re bingeing out on Netflix for hours at a time, you probably already know by now that you need to counter that with movement. Sitting disease is the new smoking. It’s bad. But so far, no one has been able to give any exact recommendations on what the heck to do about it!
Until now…
This article is a great read if you’re interested in a more in-depth look at the study.
Researchers have come to the conclusion that you should do moderate exercise for one hour per day to counteract the horrible side effects of sitting disease.
Maybe that sounds overwhelming to you. But with a few tweaks, it isn’t be hard to manage. Especially since they say it doesn’t have to all be done at once.
Here are a few tips for you 9-to-5-ers to get your hour in:
- Bike or walk briskly to work. Or park far enough away that it will take you 15 minutes to walk to work.
- Use your lunch break to get a walk in.
- Stand for two hours: If you sit for 6 hours, you only have to work out for 30 minutes to counteract it. So, get a standing desk and reduce the number of hours you’re sitting. Feel free to sway to your favorite music or do intermittent calf raises.
- Move once per hour. Sneak into a conference room and do a minute of squats. Be vigilant about this! It’s easy to ignore the clock, but with vigilance, you can make this a habit.
Thankfully I have this amazing riverwalk at my disposal!
If you want to be fit and healthy, this is what needs to be done! Even if you work out in the morning for a half-hour before work and then you sit your shift out, you’re not going to get anywhere. This could be one of those sneaky reasons you’re not losing weight!
So, get up!
Sitting disease is a real thing, and you sure as heck don’t want to catch it!
What are your favorite ways to break up the workday?
What is perhaps less obvious – and even more worrying – than the fact that inactivity is bad for us, is the recent Wisconsin discovery that the health risks from sitting down cannot be entirely counteracted by exercise, as you may imagine.
Oh, I’d love to read the WI study. That’s where I live. Do you have a link by chance?
Yes! Finally someone to call me out when I watch a few too many episodes of my favs on Netflix! ‘Sitting disease’ is a huge problem in our electronic age and especially at desk jobs! Even as a stay at home mom I make sure to use the farthest bathroom upstairs or park further away to get some extra sun in a busy day of running errands. It actually gives me more energy in the long run, which increases my speed and saves me any time those small efforts took.
Haha! I’m sure you don’t watch as much as a lot of people. Desk jobs are exactly where ‘sitting disease’ is showing up! That’s excellent that you do those things.
But without replacing all our chairs with treadmills, what else can we do to save ourselves from sitting disease in a way that’s appropriate for a work environment?
I have a few suggestions in the post: using your lunch and shorter breaks to get up and get moving. Standing at your desk might be another option. I would make it a rule to get up once an hour, to get a cup of coffee or use the farthest restroom.