Standing Up Keeps You Fit
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Prolonged sitting is detrimental to your health and standing up for just a minute here and then can reduce your waist size and lower the risk of heart diseases, an Australian study found.
Desk Jockeys At Risk
Researchers from the University of Queensland examined 4,700 US adults, who for seven days had to wear a sensor that recorded their movements. They also took blood samples to measure cholesterol and insulin, as well as measuring the waist size of the participants.
The results at first don’t seem particularly astonishing: The more a person sits, the more likely he is to register higher on heart disease risk factors like a larger waist size or lower HDL cholesterol. Even in those that regularly participated in recreational fitness activities, this negative effect of prolonged sitting was noticeable.
Small Changes
However, those that during the day got up from a sitting position more often, even for just a minute at a time, had slimmer waists with pants up to two sizes smaller than those who took the fewest breaks from sitting. The group that fared bests of all was the one that regularly exercised and got up more often.
This goes directly back to what I said a while ago: Small changes can make a difference. The study’s lead resarcher, Genevieve Healy, gave the examples of standing while taking a phone call, walking over to colleagues rather than sending an e-mail or using stairs to get to different work areas.
In a statement she said: “‘Stand up, move more, more often’ could be used as a slogan to get this message across.”
Picture courtesy of Merrick Monroe.
8 Comments
I didn’t make it past the picture… 0.o
Happily, my work in tech support keeps me on my toes. 🙂 Nice article though Mr Evil.
I try to balance between dry scientific information and visually appealing pictures, to spice it up. I may not always succeed with the balancing 😉
Did you sit down to write this?
LMAO 🙂
I think the difference in waist size occurs because the people who can tollerate sitting for prolonged periods of time probably don’t live the healthiest lifestyle outside of work. I doubt the actual act of getting up for a minute actually plays much of a role. The sitting for long periods of time is probably just an indicator of how that person lives their life.
Correlation=/= causality. Like titans said, these people that get up every now and then are the people who are more aware of health/exercise related stuffs.
The sedentary people are always sedentary so sitting 8 hours at work is only different than what they do in their free time because it’s in a cubicle. Not really going to make them uncomortable, so there’s no need to get up
Well, the people who were active outside of their jobs but got up less often still fared worse than those active and getting up more often.
O.o intristin