How Much Exercise You Need to 'Offset' a Day of Sitting

Scientists Figured Out How Much Exercise You Need to 'Offset' a Day of Sitting

DAVID NIELD

30 AUGUST 2021

We know that spending hour after hour sitting down isn't good for us, but just how much exercise is needed to counteract the negative health impact of a day at a desk? A 2020 study suggests about 30-40 minutes per day of building up a sweat should do it.

Up to 40 minutes of "moderate to vigorous intensity physical activity" every day is about the right amount to balance out 10 hours of sitting still, the research says – although any amount of exercise or even just standing up helps to some extent.

That's based on a meta-analysis across nine previous studies, involving a total of 44,370 people in four different countries who were wearing some form of fitness tracker.

The analysis found the risk of death among those with a more sedentary lifestyle went up as time spent engaging in moderate-to-vigorous intensity physical activity went down.

"In active individuals doing about 30-40 minutes of moderate to vigorous intensity physical activity, the association between high sedentary time and risk of death is not significantly different from those with low amounts of sedentary time," the researchers wrote in the British Journal of Sports Medicine (BJSM) in 2020.

In other words, putting in some reasonably intensive activities – cycling, brisk walking, gardening – can lower your risk of an earlier death right back down to what it would be if you weren't doing all that sitting around, to the extent that this link can be seen in the amassed data of many thousands of people.

While meta-analyses like this one always require some elaborate dot-joining across separate studies with different volunteers, timescales, and conditions, the benefit of this particular piece of research is that it relied on relatively objective data from wearables – not data self-reported by the participants.

The study was published alongside the release of the World Health Organization 2020 Global Guidelines on Physical Activity and Sedentary Behavior, put together by 40 scientists across six continents. In fact, in November 2020 BJSM put out a special edition to carry both the new study and the new guidelines.

"These guidelines are very timely, given that we are in the middle of a global pandemic, which has confined people indoors for long periods and encouraged an increase in sedentary behavior," said physical activity and population health researcher Emmanuel Stamatakis from the University of Sydney in Australia.

"People can still protect their health and offset the harmful effects of physical inactivity," says Stamatakis, who wasn't involved in the meta-analysis but is the co-editor of the BJSM. "As these guidelines emphasize, all physical activity counts and any amount of it is better than none."

The research based on fitness trackers is broadly in line with the new WHO guidelines, which recommend 150-300 mins of moderate intensity or 75-150 mins of vigorous-intensity physical activity every week to counter sedentary behavior.

Walking up the stairs instead of taking the lift, playing with children and pets, taking part in yoga or dancing, doing household chores, walking, and cycling are all put forward as ways in which people can be more active – and if you can't manage the 30-40 minutes right away, the researchers say, start off small.

Making recommendations across all ages and body types is tricky, though the 40 minute time frame for activity fits in with previous research. As more data are published, we should learn more about how to stay healthy even if we have to spend extended periods of time at a desk.

"Although the new guidelines reflect the best available science, there are still some gaps in our knowledge," said Stamatakis.

"We are still not clear, for example, where exactly the bar for 'too much sitting' is. But this is a fast-paced field of research, and we will hopefully have answers in a few years' time."

The research was published here, and the WHO guidelines here, in the British Journal of Sports Medicine.

A version of this article was originally published in November 2020.

https://www.sciencealert.com/scientists-figured-out-how-much-exercise-you-need-to-offset-a-day-of-inactivity

5 Tips to Stay Healthy If You Sit at a Computer All Day

Long hours, slouching, slumping, and straining can dominate the office. Clean up your act around the computer, before bad habits lead to poor health.

By John Patrick Pullen

8:30 AM ET

Avoid painful posture and eye problems with these tips

Here are five ways to make sure your computer desk doesn’t become the death of you.

1. Give your monitor a second look.If your screen is planted directly on your desktop, it’s time to ask management for a raise — for your computer’s display. According to Dr. Jim Sheedy, director of the Vision Performance Institute at Pacific University, the top of your the screen should be level with your eyes. The ideas is to get the eyes looking down about 10 degrees. If it’s any lower or higher, computer users will adapt to it by moving their head. If your screen is to low, your head points down, causing neck and back aches. High displays, meanwhile, contribute to dry eye syndrome.

2. Poor posture? Take it on the chin.Poor posture is something that every office-based employee should consider throughout their day. Most people sitting at a computer get drawn into the screen, which means they crane their necks forward. This imbalance puts strain on the neck and spine. It’s like holding a bowling ball with one hand, says Dr. James Bowman, of Portland, Ore.-based Solutions Chiropractic. If your arm is vertical underneath, it puts less strain on the muscles, but lean that ball forward and your muscles have to compensate to keep it aloft. Sitting at a desk, that bowling ball is actually our head, so Bowman recommends chin retractions, or making a double chin, to keep the neck and spine lined up underneath.

“It’s probably the most effective single exercise you can do for the upper back and neck,” he says.

3. Stand up for yourself.The modern workplace was built around the concept of sitting, but humans’ ability to stand goes back millions of years. Buck the trend of the office era with a standing desk — or, if that’s too radical, a sit-stand workstation. According to research out of the University of Minnesota and the Mayo Clinic, sit-stand workstations helped workers replace 25 percent of their sitting time with standing up, which can increase their sense of well being and decreased their fatigue and appetite. The Jarvis Desk can go from 26-inches to 51-inches at the push of a button, lifting up to 350 pounds of whatever’s on your desk—including multiple monitors.

“I definitely feel healthier standing while working as it causes me to be more focused on my posture and ‘hold’ myself better in terms of my stomach and shoulders especially,” says Dan McCormack, who uses a Jarvis Desk at his home office in Austin, Texas.

4. Move it or lose it.But why stand when you could walk? Many offices around the country are getting wise to treadmill desks, which can help workers burn 100 calories more per hour over sitting, according to a study by the National Institutes of Health.

“The most important thing is to switch it up and work in different positions throughout the day,” says Emily Couey, Eventbrite’s vice president of people. The online event ticketing service offers multiple workspace options including traditional sitting desks, standing desks, and treadmill desks, which Couey says “people love, because it allows them move while they work — especially those with fitness trackers counting their daily steps.”

5. Pace yourself.All work and no play makes Jack a bad employee. Whether it’s on their phone in the bathroom or on the computer in their cube, everyone takes sanity breaks to check their Facebook or read some news. ThePomodoro Technique even encourages this kind of behavior by breaking tasks into “pomodoros,” intense 25 minute work bursts, followed by five-minute breaks.

Named because they can be measured using little tomato-shaped kitchen timers (Pomodoro is Italian for tomato), this method lets people work intensely and stave off distraction, yet rewards them with time to goof off, as well. If you don’t have a tomato timer handy, there are a lot of apps online to keep track of your sessions. But Francesco Cirillo, the technique’s founder, recommends using the real deal.

“You have to be able to actually wind it up,” Cirillo says in his book, The Pomodoro Technique. “The act of winding up the Pomodoro is a declaration of your determination to start working on the activity at hand.”

http://motto.time.com/4268443/computer-health-tips/

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Don't Want to Be Hunched Over as You Age... Take Note of This

If you don't want to be stooped over as you age, this is a fundamental you dare not ignore. Not just great for your looks, this will help give your internal organs the space they need to maintain optimal functionality.

Principles of Natural Posture for Health and Pain Relief

September 27, 2015 

Story at-a-glance

• Chronic sitting is a risk factor for poor health, pain, and early death. But HOW you sit may have a significant impact on the risks of sitting
• By sitting with feet planted on the floor, with your pelvis and spine properly stacked and aligned, you can take the stress and tension out of sitting and make sitting into a beneficial physical activity
• Three simple exercises that help you engage your core and correct your posture are described

By Dr. Mercola

Most of our parents drilled into our heads the importance of proper posture; yet modern day life causes us to frequently ignore these great recommendations. What's worse, many of the posture-correcting strategies our parents taught us turn out to be wrong anyway.

Kathleen Porter, author of Natural Posture for Pain Free Living, is an expert in teaching the principles of posture, and she believes the majority of pain experienced in the world is posture related.

While working as a massage therapist and yoga teacher in 1994, she came across an article written by Jean Couch, in which she discussed and described the skeletal alignment in groups of indigenous people.

Intrigued, Kathleen began studying with Jean, and eventually traveled through Indonesia, Southeast Asia, South America, and northern Portugal, studying the posture of native peoples for herself.

"As I learned from studying them and from Jean, I started incorporating these principles more and more into my own life, and then started teaching this to others.

I've written a couple of books. It has just been absolutely transformational," she says.

"I gave up stretching. I haven't stretched in close to 20 years, yet I am more flexible and pain-free than when I was working so hard at trying to be that way."

Turning Sitting into a Physical Activity

Sitting is the new smoking. About 10,000 studies have now established that chronic sitting is an independent risk factor for poor health and early death. It can also be a significant factor in back, neck, and sciatic pain.

I personally suffered from back pain for many years. None of the treatments I tried made any significant difference — until I began to restrict my sitting to less than an hour per day. Then the pain suddenly disappeared.

Below are two videos I did for our 18th anniversary exercise update that show my solution to completely resolve my back pain, and I do mean 100 percent. My stand-up desk is the first video and my daily beach walks that help me log about 63 miles a week is the second.

How You Sit Makes a Difference

Although I now limit my sitting to under one hour a day when not on a plane, Kathleen believes HOW you sit can have a significant impact on the risks of sitting. 

"Believe it or not, there is a way to sit and make it into a physical activity,"she says.

"I, sitting right now, have my feet planted on the floor. I'm sitting on an aligned pelvis. There's nothing stressful in the way that I'm sitting because my body is aligned.

Energy is flowing through my body. I'm not using muscles other than the most basic muscles I would use. It's mostly my core that's stabilizing my upright posture, but there's no effort or strain here.

Now, I would run into trouble immediately if I started to tuck my tailbone under. That's the problem with sitting."

Most people tend to either tuck their pelvis and collapse, or they try to counteract the tendency to slouch by lifting their chest and pulling their shoulders back, which results in tension.

"Often, if you have a sitting-kind of job, you're spending much of your day swinging back and forth from one to the other, not knowing that there is this beautiful, peaceful, and relaxed middle place.

If you know how to align your bones and let them support you, it's easy. There's no effort involved and it's not stressful," she says.

I believe avoiding sitting is an important aspect of health and can be key for reducing pain, but as Kathleen points out, standing up may not improve your pain unless you also stand correctly.

I could not agree more strongly with Kathleen and her book helped me learn how to stand properly. Most people don't know how to sit; nor do they know how to stand with correct posture. Kathleen's book illustrates proper posture quite well, providing many diagrams that make it easy to understand the principles behind good posture, both when sitting and standing.

Basic Principles of Proper Posture

Relearning proper posture is an unfolding process that requires a commitment to learn the information and put it into practice.

"The word 'practice' is key, because you just have to keep practicing it over and over until it becomes more natural and more automatic," she says. "When I first learned this I was pretty upset, because this information was so opposite from what I had been trained to do and teach as a yoga teacher.

One of the real silver linings of learning this is the fact that it is a pathway. It's a touchstone to mindfulness, because it requires a willingness to be mindful in order to put it into practice. Mindfulness and alignment [go hand in hand]. You really need them both."

According to Kathleen, it all begins with the pelvis. It forms the foundation for everything above it. Your sacrum is located in the back between the two sides of your pelvis. At the top of the sacrum is the sacral platform that your spine sits upon.

If you change the position of your pelvis, you change the angle of that platform and the angle of your spine, and muscles go through a number of adjustments to compensate for the fact that your spine is no longer acting as a largely self-supporting structure.

"There is this quality, this natural phenomenon, [the] ground reaction force," Kathleen explains. "You can experience it right now if you're sitting or standing. Take your right foot and start pushing it down into the floor. As you push your foot a little harder, you'll notice that it generates this action and sensations in your leg. 

If you push down hard enough, you'll feel there are sensations coming all the way up into your hip and beyond. This is ground reaction force. It relates to Newton's Third Law of Motion, which says that for every action, there is an opposite and equal reaction.

If you wanted to, say, jump, you wouldn't just jump, you'd crouch down, you'd generate this connection, and then you'd push off. If you wanted to jump higher, you'd crouch lower and push off harder. This is how our bodies are designed to work.

What has happened to modern people with much more sedentary lives and a disconnection from knowing how our bodies work naturally, we tend to just shuffle along on top of the surface of the earth. We haul ourselves up out of a chair. We drop ourselves down onto a chair.

We have this sort of cascading effect of embedding unhelpful, unnatural movement patterns, which degenerates our physical structure over time. That's why people, as they age, start to often look so collapsed. That's not an inevitable feature of aging."

'Sad Dog, Happy Dog' Postures

The descriptions for "sad dog" and "happy dog" came about as a result of working with children, who are easily embarrassed or amused by words like "pelvis" or "pubic bone." Similarly, many adults have trouble with more technical terms like anteverted or retroverted. Kids understand the "sad dog" posture though, because a sad dog will tuck its tail between its legs. As you "tuck your tail," i.e. tuck your pelvis forward, you'll notice your spine starts to collapse down into your pelvis. This stance also tends to trigger the reaction to pull your chest up and your shoulders back.

"This is somewhat militaristic, but it's also the way I was practicing and teaching yoga. It's what is taught in a lot of dance programs and in a lot of athletics. It's sort of the American way of opening up the front of the body, without realizing that when we do that, we close, narrow, and shorten the back," she says.

What you're aiming for is to have your front and back equally wide and equally extended, and it all begins with the position of your pelvis. If you rotate your pelvis toward the back, so your pubic bone is down and your sit bones are wide and behind you, it's sort of like you're wagging your tail. This is the "happy dog" posture.

"The pelvis comes into play in the same way in standing. In my book, I have illustrations of how to move the pelvis like a church bell so that it brings the legs into a vertical line, because that's where our legs need to be. From there, you want to start to learn how to isolate the movement of your rib cage, so you discover that your ribcage can actually move independent of your pelvis, and you can learn how to rotate your ribcage forward rather than lifting it. When you lift up your chest, you're actually tipping your ribcage back.

Kathleen notes that while collapsing in the front is known as slouching, lifting your chest and arching your back is actually slouching in the other direction, because it has the same effect on your spine. It's just a question of which side of the spine — the front or the back — is being compressed.

Simple Posture Exercises

Three helpful exercises that bring home this point and help engage your core are as follows:

1. Pretend you're holding a shawl behind you and you're about to wrap the shawl around your shoulders, but just before the shawl comes into contact with your back, move your back into the shawl. In other words, your breastbone or your sternum slides backwards towards your back. As you do that, you will feel an action through your abdomen. These are your core muscles, primarily your transversus abdominis (TVA) muscle coming into action. This is your real core. The TVA is the deepest abdominal muscle, which acts like an internal corset.
Next, wiggle the back of your armpits up towards the ceiling, and feel your spine lengthening. Also notice the position of your chin. By bringing you chin down, the back of your neck lengthens and the cervical spine that goes through in the middle of your neck opens up. When you lift your chin up, you shorten your cervical spine.

"This is one of the most essential basic movements that helps retrain the body back to where it started," Kathleen says.

Note that the fibers of the TVA are horizontal while most skeletal muscles are vertical or diagonal. As you work with this core muscle, you'll feel its contraction as a horizontal squeezing; as your sternum moves toward the back, you'll feel your waist narrowing as this muscle engages. 
As noted by Kathleen:

"[Y]ou want to engage this muscle all day long. You can do it in a car. You can do it when you're working at your computer. You can do it while having a conversation... As many times a day as you can, be mindful of your body as an aligned being. Not only are your bones aligned but you are aligning yourself with your true nature as a part of this earth. Let that be an awareness that is continuous and without interruption."

Some find mindfulness reminders helpful. One app called Mindful Mynah will allow you to set a chime or bell to go off at regular intervals, reminding you to tune into your body and correct your posture.

"Doing it cultivates your capacity for mindfulness," Kathleen says. "My own personal capacity for mindfulness has just exploded with this focusing on my bones as my basic support."

2. A simplified version of that exercise is to simply imagine your sternum moving back towards your spine. As you do so, you will feel your core engage, stabilizing, and elongating your spine. When I do it, my chin also tends to fall into place automatically. When your spine is elongated in this way, it helps prevent and may even help reverse kyphosis, lordosis, and other distortions of your spine that occur as a result of a collapsed posture.
3. A similar exercise is to bring your arms overhead but in front of your head, clasping your hands together. Avoid bringing your arms back behind your ears as that will cause your back to arch. Remember to rotate your pubic bone downward into "happy dog" pose. When your pubic bone is aiming down, your pelvis is naturally rotated forward. From there, put your arms out in front and lengthen your spine so you feel your ribcage lifting up out of your pelvis. Remember, the lengthening you seek is of the spine in your back, not along your front.

Bend Like a Baby

The best exercises focus on natural ways of moving, and toddlers are the "gurus" of proper movement. Bending is an excellent exercise, provided you do it correctly. If you observe a toddler, you'll notice they always bend by sticking their butt out behind them, with the knees bending outward toward the pinky toes. As Kathleen notes:

"[B]ending is not in the spine, either rounding the spine or arching the spine. The spine stays stable as the pelvis rotates over the heads of the femur bones in the thighs."

As you bend this way, not only does it protect your spine and tone your leg muscles, it also strengthens the arches in your feet. Many have foot problems that can contribute to pain, including pronated ankles and flat arches. Bending this way helps to strengthen the muscles that lift and hold your arches up, and engages the toes.

"For a lot of us, toes are just these appendages that we don't do anything with because they're in shoes all the time. But if you look at the toes of young children, their toes are grabbing at the ground. They help you balance. They're there to help you propel yourself forward and to help distribute the weight that doesn't come down through the heels," Kathleen explains.

When Bones Are Aligned, Your Muscles Become Elastic and Supple

The basic kettlebell swing is an excellent exercise that brings bending and strength training together. It's crucial to do them with correct posture though. Unless you already have good posture, you'd be better off focusing on learning how to move naturally — things like bending to pick something up or to tie your shoelace, getting up and down out of a chair, or lifting a laundry basket off the floor. Other daily activities that offer plenty of opportunity to practice natural movement posture include weeding your garden or cleaning your house.

As a general rule, it's important to remember that your musculoskeletal system involves both muscles and bones. So while many focus on building stronger core muscles in the hopes of improving posture, you also need to properly align your bones.

Kathleen used to have to do a lot of stretching to remain pain free and supple despite teaching yoga, and the tendency to have tight muscles is actually a side effect of poor skeletal alignment, she discovered. Once she addressed her posture, she didn't have to stretch anymore.

"One of the jobs of the skeleton is to provide the structural framework of support... Our organs are often smashed together, pulled, and distorted in various ways because our skeleton is misplaced. If I am strengthening some muscles too much, the tightness, contraction, and the shortening of the fibers of those muscles will pull and hold my bones out of alignment. By the same token, if I have muscles that are too weak and stretched out, they won't support the bones in that alignment," Kathleen explains.

"It helps to know that because the muscles attached to the bones, if you change the position of your bones, then certain muscles are going to be too tight and certain muscles are going to be too long and stretched out. [But] when your bones are aligned, muscles become elastic. All the muscles in your body take on their intended configuration."

More Information

To learn more, I highly recommend Kathleen's book, Natural Posture for Pain Free Living: The Practice of Mindful Alignment,which goes into far greater depth and covers many other aspects of posture not covered in this interview. As the subtitle reveals, one of the keys of success is the integration of mindfulness and posture — to become aware of where your pelvis, spine, head, neck, and shoulders and all the rest of your body is positioned in any given moment. You may also find more information on her website, NaturalPostureSolutions.com.

In closing, Kathleen offers the following down-to-earth suggestion:

"Go to the playground; watch children and how they move... Start moving naturally, and bring this back into how you work out at the gym. There is a lot of stuff that people do that is just not a good idea, period. But we've just been so conditioned into believing that we're supposed to be exercising and working out instead of just simply climbing a ladder to clean the gutters, and doing it in such a way that reinforces the way we move. So much of the exercise that is done is done as a way to release the tension that we have in our bodies from the misalignment that we have in the first place." 

http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2015/09/27/natural-posture-principles.aspx

This post is on Healthwise

Sitting Kills, Moving Heals

June 23, 2013                    

Story at-a-glance

• Sitting for extended periods of time is an independent risk factor for poor health and premature death. Even if you are very fit, if you uninterruptedly sit for a great percentage of the time, you’re still at an increased risk of dying prematurely
• Research by the NASA scientist responsible for monitoring the astronauts, shows your body declines rapidly when sitting for long periods
• Simply standing up over 30 times a day is a powerful antidote to long periods of sitting and is more effective than walking
• There are virtually unlimited opportunities for movement throughout the day, from doing housework or gardening, to cooking and even just standing up every 10 minutes
• It’s not how many hours of sitting that's bad for you; it’s how often you interrupt that sitting that is GOOD for you

            
Download Interview Transcript

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By Dr. Mercola

If you’re like most people, myself included, you probably spend a large portion of each day in a seated position. It’s hard to avoid these days, as computer work predominates, and most also spend many hours each week driving to and from work. 

Mounting research now suggests that sitting in and of itself is an independent risk factor for poor health and premature death—even if you exercise regularly. 

Dr. Joan Vernikos, former director of NASA’s Life Sciences Division and author of Sitting Kills, Moving Heals, presents a simple yet powerful scientific explanation for why sitting has such a dramatic impact on your health, and how you can simply and easily counteract the ill effects of sitting. 

She was one of the primary doctors responsible for ensuring the health of the astronauts as they went into space, investigating the health ramifications of space travel, and what can be done to counter them. 

On a side note, one of my initial life ambitions was actually to be an astronaut, up until college when I opted for pre-med instead. I’m glad I didn’t pursue being an astronaut because I think there are far too many health dangers associated with working in space. But it was definitely an initial ambition of mine.  

My primary passion is improving health which is why I’m very excited about Dr. Vernikos’ work. There have been a number of studies within the last year or two that show that even if you are very fit, exercising as much as five times a week for a half hour to an hour each time, you can fall far short of optimum fitness if you sit most of the rest of the time. You’re even at an increased risk of dying prematurely.  

Dr. Vernikos’ research with astronauts has clarified why this occurs and, even more importantly, provides us with a simple regimen that could counteract those consequences. 

In order to determine why regular exercise does not appear to compensate for the negative effects of prolonged sitting, some of her research focused on finding out what type of movement is withdrawn by sitting. What she discovered was as revolutionary as it was counterintuitive. Not only did she discover that the act of standing up is more effective than walking for counteracting the ill effects of sitting, the key is how many times you stand up. 

It’s actually the change in posture that is the most powerful signal, in terms of having a beneficial impact on your health, not the act of standing in and of itself. Put another way, the key to counteract the ill effects of sitting is to repeatedly interrupt your sitting. The key is frequent intermittent interactions with gravity. Standing up 35 times at once will provide only a small percent of the benefit of standing up once every 20 minutes.

It’s All About Interacting Regularly With Gravity 

During Skylab, which was the longest mission Dr. Vernikos worked on in the early 1970s, many medical observers noted that astronauts were prematurely aging while in space. Interestingly, the changes that were occurring were found to be very similar to what happens to you when you’re bedridden, and to the aging process itself. Initially, Dr. Vernikos referred to these phenomena as parallel processes, as she could not prove a cause and effect that were identical to all three.
That eventually changed when she was doing a bed-rest study.

“I was helping a friend out whose parents had come from Greece and spoke no English,” she says. “The lady had fallen and broken her hip, had it fixed and replaced. But she refused to stand up and get out of bed. She eventually ended up in a nursing home in California... What struck me at the nursing home was that many of the things I saw in these older people were very similar to what I could see in my subjects who have been lying in bed for seven days. Especially when they got out of bed, when balance and coordination is affected, and they would pass out when standing up, and they would shuffle their feet.

I thought, well, this is very strange. The people who are in bed, and the astronauts, recover. But here are these people in the nursing home who are showing exactly the same changes. Maybe one should turn the question around?

Maybe the question is not ‘what causes the changes in them—is it or isn’t it aging?’ Maybe it is the conditions that they find themselves in—the inactivity or the relative inactivity in space that induces these changes rather than the number of years one has? When I started asking that question, then some of the research began to make sense.”

Did you know that the changes in bone and muscle that occur here on Earth in one year’s time–approximately one percent loss of bone or one percent loss of muscle–occur in just one week to one month when you’re in space? Incredibly, you get close to a 10-fold acceleration of the aging process when you live in a gravity-free environment! And this is part of the equation when it comes to explaining why chronic sitting is an independent risk factor for premature death.

Astronaut Legend Proves Biological Age Can Be Counteracted

Astronaut John Glenn was the first man to perform an orbital flight. He eventually became a US Senator, and at the age of 77 became the oldest man in space, thanks to Dr. Vernikos, when he participated in her experiment to validate her theory of aging in the microgravity of space.

“[Glenn] happened to be chair of the Committee on Aging at the time,” she says. “It occurred to him, as he was listening to all these testimonies, that what he heard was very much like what he had experienced and what he knew his colleagues were experiencing as they flew. So, he got very excited.

One day in 1997, he walked into my office. He had done some fantastic research... comparing the aerospace medicine textbook with the PDR on the effects of aging and drew comparisons between the two. He said, ‘Well, I think if I flew again, it could provide information that could help everyone as we age’... I was concerned not because of what might happen to him during the nine days of flight, but what might happen to him in terms of recovery.”

Still, the flight took place, placing Glenn at the age of 77 in space with five other astronauts, averaging in age between 35 and 45. The results, which were double-blind, were presented before a full auditorium at the NIH.

“What they showed on the slide was that out of the seven people who flew, one was an outlier. So, we all thought to ourselves, ‘Oh, dear, they’re his. He’s an outlier. He’s older, that’s why'... This confirms that if you’re older, you will react differently.”

But when the identities of the astronauts in the data points were revealed, John Glenn was NOT the outlier. A 35-year-old astronaut was. Glenn was actually right in the middle of the cluster of astronauts, suggesting that if you’re healthy and fit, you really can do anything, regardless of your age. His recovery post-flight also turned out to be just as fast as his younger peers.

Your Lifestyle Determines How Quickly Your Body Ages 

What this means for us living permanently here on Earth is that the changes that accompany aging are more likely a result of our lifestyle rather than the inevitable outcome associated with a numerical or physiological age. The good news is that you can prevent, and to a great degree delay, the damage associated with a large portion of biological aging, especially the most crippling, which is pain with movement and loss of flexibility that you had as a youth. 

It also means that getting too hung up on a once-a-day exercise routine is to put the cart before the horse. FIRST you need to make sure you’re engaging in more or less perpetual non-exercise movement, as this is an independent risk factor. You then want to add structured exercise on top of that to reap all the benefits associated with exercise. Going to the gym a few times a week for an hour simply isn’t going to counteract hours upon hours of chronic uninterrupted sitting, which essentially mimics a microgravity situation, i.e. you’re not exerting your body against gravity. Only frequent non-exercise movement will do that.

“What became abundantly clear to me very quickly was that gravity plays a big role in our physiological function and in the aging process,” Dr. Vernikos says.

Fortunately, there’s nothing complicated about this. The key point is to move and shift position often, when you’re sitting down. Meaning, you want to interrupt your sitting as often as possible.

“We were designed to squat. We were designed to kneel. Sitting is okay, but it’s uninterrupted sitting that is bad for us,” Dr. Vernikos says. “We are not designed to sit continuously. We are not designed to be in quasi-microgravity... It’s not how many hours of sitting that's bad for you; it’s how often you interrupt that sitting that is GOOD for you!”

The other thing is that when I say ‘Stand up,’ then you say, ‘Okay, standing is the opposite of sitting.’ No, standing is not the opposite of sitting, because sitting continuously is bad for you, and standing continuously is bad for you. The body is not designed to respond to square waves. Any retail employee will tell you that they suffer all kinds of consequences of many hours of standing on the job. Even nurses have known this for years: standing on the job is not good for you It’s about interrupting the sitting. The interrupting the sitting is not necessarily walking; it is the change in posture [that matters].”  

 

Gravity as a Stimulus to Achieve Health... 

Interestingly, lipoprotein lipase is dramatically reduced during inactivity, and increases with activity, the most effective activity being, you guessed it, standing up from a seated position. Lipoprotein lipase is an enzyme that attaches to fat in your bloodstream and transports it into your muscles to be used as fuel. So essentially, simply by standing up, you are actively helping your body to burn fat for fuel. But what is it about the mechanism of standing up that would account for this?

“These are all movements, almost below-threshold kind of movements, that do not burn up a lot of calories, as we know them, but that are designed to work against gravity,” Dr. Vernikos explains.

Dr. Vernikos views gravity a bit differently from the norm. She thinks of gravity as a virtual rod that runs through your body when you’re standing up; down to the center of the Earth. This virtual rod acts as a stimulus for your body, or put another way, gravity is a source of stimulation to your body. When you use it; when you challenge its downward force, you get a sense of acceleration and a sense of fun. Examples include jumping, skipping rope, cycling, downhill skiing, snow- or bodyboarding...

“I’ve come to the conclusion that all the fun activities that we indulge in are based on gravity,” she says. “All these fun activities, all these games and play that we think of, are gravity-dependent. We are using gravity every which way. The moral to the story is be a child again. Have fun. Play!”

On Picking a Better Office Chair... And Standing Up 35 Times a Day 

A better alternative to the traditional office chair, according to Dr. Vernikos, would be an upright wooden chair with no armrest.

“I will accept the armrest if you promise me that you really rest your elbows on it. You’re not resting your elbows, are you? If you rest your elbows and push them back every so often, which means your shoulder blades are being pushed back, and then you can relax again. But you do it as often as you possibly can. That will correct a lot of your postural problems. But if you sit in a hard back chair, a good old-fashioned chair, it can have a nice comfortable pillow, but it forces you to stand up and to sit up straight,” she says.

In the end, it’s really all about structuring your life to incorporate everyday body movements that your parents and grandparents used to do in the course of day-to-day living: picking stray socks off the floor, stirring a pot of sauce, reaching up high for an item in a cupboard, getting off the couch to change the channel, walking to the mailbox and back. Think about it... if you didn’t have a computer or a smart phone, what would you have to do to get that message to a friend, for example? 

Dr. Vernikos calls these types of movements gravity habits or “G habits.” These are all movements that are quantified as non-exercise activities, and the challenge is to get more of them into your daily life. When it comes to interrupting your sitting, you want to stand up around 35 times a day or so to counteract the cardiovascular health risks associated with sitting. This is based on double-blind research where volunteers would spend four days in bed to induce detrimental changes. She then tested two groups to see which was more effective, walking or standing, and how long would you have to walk or how many times do you have to stand up to get better again?

• Standing up once every hour was more effective than walking on a treadmill for 15 minutes for cardiovascular and metabolic changes
• Sitting down and standing up repeatedly for 32 minutes does NOT have the same effect as standing up once, 32 times over the course of a day. To get the benefit, the stimulus must be spread throughout the day

What I Now Do to Interrupt My Sitting 

After reading Dr. Vernikos book, Sitting Kills, Moving Heals, I was inspired to give some serious attention to this because even though I perform a lot of structured exercise, including high intensity interval training, I was guilty of sitting down a vast majority of the rest of the day.  

So what I’ve done is this: I found an online timer and set it to go off every 20 minutes. When it goes off, I stand up and do four jump squats. I thought of this after looking at a table of different activities that increase your exposure to gravity in her book. One of them was jumping up and down, which gets you up to six times gravity. Alternatively, I simply stand up really slow and sit really slow five times doing a Foundation posture or I do four or five one legged squats and alternate during each period. 

As explained by Dr. Vernikos, squatting is an extension of standing. If you squat and stand, you can get the maximum benefit of working against the force of gravity. By adding jumping to it (going from a squat to a jump, landing into a squat again), you end up with about 6.5 G’s.  

However, an interesting update to this interview is that I introduced Dr. Vernikos to Dr. Eric Goodman, the creator of Foundation Training, and she was very excited to learn of his work as she believes it may provide an even more effective solution. They have yet to actually meet at this time but I am hoping they will have a fruitful collaboration and be able to report, at a future date, on a refinement of these current recommendations. 

It’s Never Too Late to Start Delaying Aging 

One of the most exciting aspects of Dr. Vernikos research is that it shows how dynamic and changeable the human body is. You can reverse damage already incurred, and it’s never too late to start. That is a massively important fact that you want to embrace. Your body CAN recover from the damage you have likely been inflicting on it for decades. Obviously, the younger and healthier you are, the quicker your body will likely respond.

“That’s why I called my first book The G-Connection: Harness Gravity and Reverse Aging,” she says. “[B]ecause yes, you can change what you are. Your body changes all the time. We have new cells being generated all the time – new brain cells – which was thought not to be the case some years ago, as well as new cells everywhere, including skin cells.”

You can boost the gravity stimulus by using either a sway plate, or a whole body vibration plate such as the Power Plate. This can be particularly beneficial for if you’re advancing in age. But other than that, what Dr. Vernikos is advocating is NOT exercise. It’s simply regular movements of everyday life:

“When you’re moving around and you see a speck on the floor, you bend down to pick it up, is that exercise? No. If you reach up to get a book off the shelf or a pot off the cupboard, is it exercise? No. When you brush your teeth, is it better to brush with a brush or with an electric brush? Electric brush already takes away some of the movement that we would normally do with a regular brush. Play golf... [but] don’t take a cart. Carry your golf-bag.”

An important and, I think, fascinating perspective that Dr. Vernikos brings to the table is that if you had to choose between starting up non-exercise activity or starting up an exercise program. Dr. Eric Goodman also believes similarly. He is in fantastic shape. He used to be a personal trainer and body builder but hasn’t worked out formally in many years; he just does his Foundation work throughout each day. They both believe non-exercise activities are more important than regular exercise programs, but ideally you would do both. Dr. Vernikos states:

“Yes, it’s my belief that the non-exercise activities are the foundation of your body tuning and your health, and more important than regular exercise,” she says. “Regular exercise is the next step. You build on the foundation.”

In short, as long as we understand the basic requirements that are dictated by our human ancestors, our biochemistry or genetics, and if we honor those with relatively simple techniques that only take a few minutes a day, it can have dramatic and profound implications on our health, and on the quality and length of our life. To learn more, I highly recommend picking up Dr. Vernikos book, Sitting Kills, Moving Heals, available online at Amazon. It’s an easy read, but it helps to reinforce the concepts discussed in this interview.

http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2013/06/23/vernikos-sitting-kills.aspx

Sit Down to See How Long You'll Live?

January 24, 2013

At a recent family gathering, I had fun demonstrating how to sit down on the floor and then stand back up without letting anything other than the bottoms of my feet and my butt touch the ground. Then several of my sisters-in-law tried it (after wisely taking off their high heels and slippery stockings), and after a few attempts, they could do it, too. So we all high-fived each other—because our success at this simple test suggests that we might enjoy good longevity, according to recent research.

Here's the scoop: For the study, 2,002 women and men between the ages of 51 and 80 were asked to use the least amount of support possible as they first lowered themselves down to sit on the floor and then rose to stand again. They didn't worry about going fast, because speed was not the point of the test.

Each participant started with five points for the sitting-down process and another five points for the standing-up process. One point was taken off for each support a participant used, such as going down onto one knee…pushing off the floor with one hand…or bracing a forearm against a thigh. A half-point was taken off if the evaluator noticed any unsteadiness. Crossing the legs at the ankles to get down and/or back up was acceptable and did not lead to lost points (which was good news to me, since that's how I do it). Participants were allowed several tries, and their best scores were the ones used for the analysis. The top possible score earned by the most agile participants was 10, while those who could not get down or back up at all scored zero.

After the test, participants were followed for an average of 6.3 years to see who lived and who did not. During the follow-up period, 7.9% of participants died.

Findings: Compared with people who scored eight or higher on the sit/stand test, the risk for death was nearly twice as high among those who scored from 6.0 to 7.5…more than three times higher for those who scored from 3.5 to 5.5…and more than five times higher for those who scored from zero to 3.0. Remarkably, each one-point increase in score was associated with a 21% improvement in the odds of survival. The results held even after researchers adjusted for various factors that affect physical functioning, including age, gender and body mass index.

The connection doesn't seem far-fetched when you think of all that's involved in getting yourself down into a floor-sitting position and then standing back up again. After all, those maneuvers depend on strength, coordination, stability, flexibility, balance and not being overweight or obese—all of which are indicators of physical well-being and function (as you'll notice next time you need to get down on the floor to retrieve an item you dropped).

Admittedly, this test gets harder to ace with age. According to the researchers' database, a score of eight or higher was earned by 88% of girls under age 20…46% of women ages 51 to 55…and 23% of women ages 61 to 65. Still, it's encouraging to note that 7% of women ages 61 to 65 achieved a perfect score of 10.

Want to try this simple test? It is best to have a health-care professional test you, the researchers noted. But if that is not feasible, for safety's sake, get your doctor's OK first, then try the maneuver on a flat, nonslippery surface. Wear nonrestrictive clothing…opt for bare feet as a safeguard against slipping…and take whatever other precautions you might need to prevent a fall. (For a video demo, click below. The audio portion is in Portuguese because the study was done in Brazil, but there are English subtitles.)


If your score turns out to be disappointing, discuss with your doctor the possible steps you could take to improve your physical condition. You might wind up improving your longevity!

Source: Claudio Gil Soares de Araújo, MD, PhD, is the medical director at Clinimex Exercise Medicine Clinic and a professor of sports medicine at Gama Filho University, both in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, and senior author of a study on the link between a sitting test and longevity published in European Journal of Preventive Cardiology.

Source: Sit Down to See How Long You'll Live?