Can sitting too much harm you like smoking?

Is sitting as bad as smoking?

Tim Cook made this analogy and it struck a nerve. I'll briefly highlight what is bad and then I'll give you tips to alleviate the toll sitting takes on your body.

•The ef­fects of pro­longed sit­ting on blood flow were ex­am­ined in a re­cent small study in­volv­ing 11 young men published in the jour­nal Ex­per­i­men­tal Phys­iol­ogy. Af­ter six hours of sit­ting, the vas­cula­ture func­tion in one of the leg’s main ar­ter­ies was re­duced by more than 50%, but was restored af­ter 10 min­utes of walking, said Jaume Padilla, an as­sistant profes­sor in the de­part­ment of nu­tri­tion and ex­er­cise phys­i­ol­ogy at the Uni­ver­sity of Mis­souri in Co­lumbia and se­nior au­thor of the study.

•Sit­ting more than an hour low­ers the lev­els of the en­zyme lipopro­tein li­pase, which causes calo­ries to be sent to fat stores rather than to mus­cle, Dr. Hedge said.

What can YOU do to counteract the effects of sitting?

**For every half-hour work­ing in an of­fice, peo­ple should sit for 20 min­utes, stand for eight min­utes and then move around and stretch for two min­utes.

**The British Jour­nal of Sports Med­i­cine ear­lier this year pub­lished guide­lines for sit­ting from an in­ternational panel of experts, in­clud­ing Dr. Hedge. The panel recom­mends a com­bined two to four hours of stand­ing and light ac­tiv­ity spread through­out the work­day. And re­search from NASA has found that stand­ing up for two min­utes 16 times a day while at work is an ef­fec­tive strat­egy for main­taining bone and mus­cle den­sity.

**Stand­ more often, it burns one-half to one calo­rie more a minute than sit­ting. In four hours, that rep­re­sents as many as 240 ad­di­tional calo­ries burned.

The Price We Pay for Sitting Too Much

http://www.wsj.com/articles/the-price-we-pay-for-sitting-too-much-1443462015

FitCampNYC offers you some salient tips to counteract too much sitting. And no, exercise alone does not to the trick. You need to break up the sitting throughout the day.