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.
A new study finds you can cut that 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%.
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