Do you sit in a chair all day? Physical activity for at least 20 minutes to reduce damage

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People who have no choice but to sit at a desk for hours on end may have seen, in recent years, a slew of headlines about the scary consequences of sitting for long periods of time — and how even regular exercise couldn’t undo the damage .

Research published Tuesday in the British Journal of Sports Medicine, however, finds that about 22 minutes a day of moderate to vigorous activity may provide an antidote to the illnesses of prolonged sitting. What’s more, the researchers found that, as a person’s activity level increases, the risk of dying prematurely from any cause goes down.

The study found that the current recommendation of 150 minutes per week of moderate to vigorous activity “is enough to counteract the detrimental health effect of prolonged sitting,” said the study’s lead author, Edvard Sagelv, a researcher at The Arctic University of Norway. “This is the beautiful part: we are talking about activities that make you breathe a little bit heavier, like brisk walking, or gardening or walking up a hill.”

While 150 minutes of physical activity may seem like a lot, Sagelv broke it down into manageable terms.

“Think of it: only 20 minutes of physical activity a day is enough, meaning, a small stroll of 10 minutes twice a day — like jumping off the bus one stop before your current destination to work and then when taking the bus back home, jumping off one stop before,” he said in an email.

The new research appears to upend findings from earlier studies showing that regular exercise didn’t zero out the negative effects associated with extended periods of sitting. One of those studies, published in the Annals of Internal Medicine in 2017, found that working out regularly reduced some of the harms associated with hours of sitting, but didn’t completely eliminate them.

In the study, researchers looked at information from nearly 12,000 people ages 50 and older in four datasets from Norway, Sweden and the United States. In those datasets, the participants wore movement detection devices on their hips for 10 hours a day for at least four days. All of the individuals included in the new study were tracked for at least two years.

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