Spending hour after hour sitting down isn’t great for your body as we all know.
However, many of us have been in a lockdown due to the coronavirus pandemic and have found lung-busting bouts of exercise hard to manage.
Population health researcher Emmanuel Stamatakis, from the University of Sydney in NSW, is acutely aware of the situation and points to two pieces of research published in the British Journal of Sports Medicine (BJSM) last year.
Up to 40 minutes of “moderate to vigorous intensity physical activity” daily is about the right amount to balance out 10 hours of sitting still, according to an analysis of nine previous studies, involving almost 45,000 people who were wearing some form of fitness tracker.
The analysis – led by Professor Ulf Ekelund, of the Department of Sport Medicine, Norwegian School of Sport Sciences in Oslo, Norway – 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.
Putting in some reasonably intensive activities – cycling, brisk walking, gardening – can lower your risk back down to what it would be if you weren’t doing all that sitting around.
In addition, the World Health Organization has released new guidelines recommending 150-300 minutes of moderate intensity or 75-150 minutes of vigorous-intensity physical activity every week to counter sedentary behaviour.
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.
But the message is clear: you can still protect your health and offset the harmful effects of physical inactivity – and any physical activity is better than none.
