This is the second installment of a new series on The Next Web, in partnership with Steve Kamb at Nerd Fitness. Guides to staying healthy, without giving up your geek lifestyle.
You’re sitting down whilst reading this…right?
Whether you’re at work at your desk, sitting in a coffee shop, lounging on your couch after a long day, or propped up in bed with your iPad, you’re probably seated firmly on your butt while reading The Next Web. And I don’t blame you – sitting has become so ingrained in our culture that most of us (myself included) spend more time sitting in a chair every day than we do sleeping.
If this sounds familiar, you are not alone
Chairs are everywhere, from the seats in our car to the office chair to the restaurant booth where we eat. Sitting seems like the most natural thing in the world, right?
However, what if sitting was actually worse for you than you realized? What if sitting all day resulted in far more health issues than you could possibly imagine? Hell, what if sitting was actually killing you?
Yeah, I know…that sentence sounds like ol’ Steve here has gone off the deep end. Unfortunately, it’s more true than you realize, especially for people in our demographic.
Here’s why you need to get off your ass…and how it could save your life.
The problem with sitting
If you’ve been reading Nerd Fitness for a while, you know that I’m a big fan of the Paleo diet and general paleo lifestyle. After all, we existed as a species for hundreds of thousands of years by living a certain way (hunting, gathering, traveling barefoot), and although technology and advances in science and medicine have certainly helped us live longer, quite a few modern ‘conveniences’ have actually made things harder for us.
Sitting is one of those conveniences that can cause all sorts of damage to our body when done to excess – AKA ‘the typical sedentary American lifestyle’.
I read a great article over on Mark’s Daily Apple that compared ‘sitting’ to today’s modern shoes and sneakers. Sure, your new Nikes might seem comfortable, but they actually weaken all of the muscles and joints in your feet and ankles by doing all of the stabilization work for you – your muscles grow weak, complacent, and bored because they have nothing to do. This is a recipe for injury and disaster.
Your core/hips/groin/legs are no different when it comes to sitting!
When you sit down, your hip flexors (the muscles that work the movements between your pelvis and thigh bones – that crease between your thigh and groin) get tightened and shortened. Meanwhile, your hamstrings and glutes (butt) get all stretched out. Now, obviously your muscles getting stretched and contracted is a part of life – it’s these actions that allow us to do fantastic things, such as ‘moving’.
However, the problems arise when we keep these muscles in this non-standard state for hours at a time.
Think of your muscles as glorified rubber bands – they can stretch and contract as you pull them. Now, take a rubber band and wrap it around a basketball, stretching it to its limit for a few weeks. When you come back and take that rubber band off the ball, it will have almost no elasticity and won’t be able to return to its original shape. Or, it might just snap. Crapola!
If you’ve ever tried to do a heavy leg workout after a day filled with hours of sitting then you know what I’m talking about – you feel like an old man or woman with the flexibility of a steel girder. And that’s just for our hips!
When you factor in slouched-over shoulders, a weakened lower back, a jacked up spine, and that hunchback look that we all adore (not), sitting in an office chair all day pretty much renders our body useless.
Health issues with sitting
Now, in addition to issues relating to flexibility (which is so crucial to having proper form during your exercises), sitting on your butt can cause a litany of other health issues as well.
The most extreme case I’ve heard of recently involved a 20-year old kid who died after getting a blood clot during a marathon video game session – one of the saddest and most tragic stories I’ve ever come across.
Here are some other health issues associated with sitting, as explained in this Art of Manliness article:
“A study found that men who sit for more than six hours of their leisure time each day had a 20% higher mortality rate than those who sat for three hours or less. The epidemiologist who conducted the study, Alpha Patel, concluded that excessive sitting literally shortens a person’s life by several years.
Another study showed that men who sat for 23 or more hours a week had a 64% greater chance of dying from heart disease than those who sat for 11 hours per week or less.”
Even the New York Times has chimed in, explaining that extended bouts of sitting can be a huge pain in the butt for your body. You simply don’t expend much energy sitting down compared to standing up and/or moving around. Sure, it might be just a difference of a dozen calories here and there, but multiplied out over ten hours a day, 365 days a year, and ten+ years…that can equal quite a bit of weight gain.
If you’re looking for something even more extreme, though it’s clearly going for shock value, check out this Sitting is Killing You infographic.
Now, as we all know, correlation does NOT prove causation, so you’d be rightly skeptical in some of the facts listed. For example, those who tend to spend all day sitting compared to those who are more active might have other health issues that can lead to an earlier death.
That being said, no matter which way you look at it…sitting all day is at best ‘not good for you’ and at worst a serious health hazard.
