Does my workout cancel my sitting?
Pick your hours sitting on a normal day and the minutes you move briskly. See how far you are from the hour that erased the extra risk of sitting, and where to fit it.
40more minutes a day
About 40 more minutes of brisk movement a day gets you to about an hour, the level where sitting stopped adding risk.
What the million-adult study found
The least active groups had 12% to 59% higher risk of death than the most active who sat least. Even the least active who sat under 4 hours had 27% higher risk.
Ekelund 2016: 1,005,791 adults followed 2 to 18 years. The most active group moved about 60 to 75 minutes a day. The middle groups wait for the full paper, so they aren't drawn.
Three ways to find the time
- A walk before work. 30 minutes before you sit down for the day.
- A 10-minute walk after each meal. Three a day is 30 minutes. Why after meals helps
- Stair bursts at the office. One minute fast, up to three times a day. Time one
These tools are for adults 18 and up. How much exercise does a teenager need?
What your result means
The gap is the brisk minutes a day between where you are and about an hour, the amount that erased the extra risk of a long day sitting in a million adults. If you're past it, your sitting showed no clear extra risk in that study. If you're short, most of the harm is the moving you aren't doing, not the chair itself.
What to do next
Close the gap in pieces. A 10-minute walk after lunch, a walking call and a fast flight of stairs on the way back each count. If you can only find part of it, any of it helps, and the first minutes help the most. Fitting exercise into a desk job has more ways to find the time.
The study behind it
Researchers pooled 16 studies of 1,005,791 adults followed for 2 to 18 years. People who sat more than 8 hours a day but moved about 60 to 75 minutes a day at a brisk pace had no clear extra risk of death. The two least active groups had 12% to 59% higher risk than the most active who sat least, and even the least active who sat under 4 hours had 27% higher risk. Most of the harm is the moving you don't do. Watching TV was harder to offset.
Read it the right way
A 30-minute workout helps, but in this study it took about an hour a day to erase the risk of a long day sitting. These are associations in groups, not your personal risk. Does a workout cancel a day of sitting?
2 sources
- Ekelund U and others, Does physical activity attenuate, or even eliminate, the detrimental association of sitting time with mortality? A harmonised meta-analysis of data from more than 1 million men and women, The Lancet, 2016europepmc.org
- US Department of Health and Human Services, Physical Activity Guidelines for Americans, 2nd edition, executive summary, 2018odphp.health.gov
