There was a great article in Monday’s Star Tribune Variety section called Stand Up. Your Desk Job May Be Hazardous To Your Health. This is not new news. In the 1950’s a study in England showed that bus conductors who spent their day sitting behind the wheel were twice as likely to have coronary heart disease as the conductors who spend their days walking up and down the aisles and climbing the stairs on double decker buses collecting fares.
Research in the last few years has shown that even if you exercise daily it still does not counteract the effects of sitting all day, although exercisers still fair better than non-exercisers. What was most interesting about this article to me was that businesses are starting to do something about this. Salo, a financial consulting and staffing agency, after participating in “inactivity research” done by the Mayo Clinic, has added 11 treadmill desks, desks that can be converted to standing desks, and telephone headsets that allow callers to walk and talk. The results? Employees cholesterol counts and weight went down while productivity went up! A win-win all around. Hopefully more companies will jump on board with this idea.
I would like to suggest that sitting can be harmful in additional ways not discussed in the article. When you sit all day, you are turning off the muscles in your core that are meant to tie you all together from top to bottom and left to right. When these muscles spend so much time turned off, they are less effective in doing their job when you do exercise and you are much more likely to get injured. Sitting all day causes you to lose your reflexive stability. So what do you do about that? You press reset.
Even if you don’t have access to a treadmill desk, there are resets you can do standing or even sitting that can help mitigate the effects of all that sitting. If you haven’t read Original Strength: Regaining the Body You Were Meant to Have by Tim Anderson and Geoff Neupert, I highly recommend it. If you want to learn how to press reset, come to a Restore Your Core class at Forza! See you there.