SITTING TOO MUCH? JUST TAKE SHORT WALK BREAKS
I sit at my computer for way too many hours a day. I might get up once an hour to check on the cat, take a bathroom break or grab a snack—but these are only short 1 or 2-minute intervals. It’s the same in the evening where I’ll sit reading a book or sometimes watching Netflix. I try to get in some exercise every day—jogging, biking, or swimming—but a recent study says this still isn’t enough. If you, like me, also spend long periods sitting, a short 5-minute walk break every half-hour can benefit your health.
Here are excerpts from an online NPR Morning Edition article by Allison Aubrey from January 12, 2023, Sitting all day can be deadly. 5-minute walks can offset harms:
If you sit at your computer all day and then lounge on the sofa for more screen time in the evening, your health can take a hit. A body of evidence links sedentary lifestyles to an increased risk of diabetes, dementia and death from heart disease.
And here’s a wake-up call: One study found, irrespective of whether a person exercised, if they sat for more than 12-13 hours a day, they were more than twice as likely to die early, compared to people who sat the least.
Cut your risk with strikingly small amounts of activity.
Researcher Keith Diaz of Columbia University Medical Center and his colleagues set out to find out what’s the least amount of physical activity a person must do to offset the health risks of sitting. They recruited volunteers to come to their lab and emulate a typical work day.
“They’d come in and sit for eight hours,” Diaz explains. The volunteers were hooked up to continuous glucose monitors to measure blood sugar levels, and their blood pressure was measured, too. Then, the participants took walking breaks of varying lengths and frequency.
“We found that a five minute walk every half-hour was able to offset a lot of the harms of sitting,” Diaz says.
The participants walked on a treadmill at a leisurely pace – about 1.9 miles per hour. “We were really struck by just how powerful the effects were,” Diaz says. People who moved five minutes every half-hour, saw blood sugar spikes after a meal reduced by almost 60%.
“This is surprising to me,” says Robert Sallis, a family medicine doctor at Kaiser Permanente, and the past president of the American College of Sports Medicine. It’s well known that exercise can help control blood sugar, but he says what’s new here is how beneficial frequent, short bouts of movement can be
“I have never seen that kind of a drop in blood sugar, other than with medication,” Sallis says. He says he’s impressed by the findings, which are published in an American College of Sports Medicine journal, Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise.