Can You Out-exercise Your Desk Job?
Unless you’re a professional athlete, exercise is something you do for fun rather than work. In fact, work often gets in the way of hitting the goals that we set for ourselves. We skip workouts because we end up in extra long meetings, don’t have time before or after our day jobs for long endurance runs or can’t fathom the mental energy to plan for races after spending 10 hours with our heads in spreadsheets.
Work gets in the way of our health in other ways too. If you have a desk-bound job, you’re likely sedentary for big chunks of time – if not most of the day. Surveys suggest that 81% of office workers spend between four and nine hours a day sitting at their desks.
We’ve long known sedentary behaviour isn’t great for your health, but a new study has linked long periods of sitting with negative outcomes for your heart.
Read ahead with a level head. To be able to sit less and move more is a privilege we don’t all have access to. However, if you need reason to take a walk around the block or peel yourself off the sofa, this study might just motivate you.
The Study
Published in the American College of Cardiology, the research aimed to look at whether sedentary behaviour itself was linked with heart failure, heart disease and other negative cardiovascular outcomes, or if it all came down to insufficient physical activity.
Researchers from Massachusetts looked at data from 89,530 people from the UK Biobank. The participants wore activity trackers for a week to find their average time spent sedentary and activity levels. That data was then monitored against their cardiovascular health outcomes for eight years.
In that time, 3,638 people developed atrial fibrillation, 1,854 people developed heart failure, 1,610 people developed myocardial infarction and 846 died of cardiovascular causes.
The Results
The main takeaway was that sedentary behaviour is associated with heart failure and cardiovascular mortality. In particular, researchers found that the participants who sat the longest – for an average of 10.6 hours a day – had the highest risk.
Some of the findings include:
Those who sat for 10.6 hours a day had a 40% increased risk of heart failure and a 54% higher risk of cardiovascular mortality compared to those who sat the least amount of time.
Those who sat for the longest but still met the recommended activity guidelines of 150 minutes of moderate exercise a week decreased their risk. Their risk of heart disease increased by 15%, while cardiovascular mortality increased by 33%, compared to those who sat for the shortest time.
Replacing just 30 minutes of excessive sitting a day with any type of physical activity can lower heart health risks. Moderate-to-vigorous activity cut the risk of heart failure by 15% and CV mortality by 10%, while light activity made a difference by reducing heart failure risk by 6% and cardiovascular mortality by 9%.
What This Means for Us
The longer you sit, the worse your cardiovascular outcomes will be, according to this study. But the most interesting part of this research could be how exercise affects outcomes.
Spending 30 minutes a day moving – whether lifting weights, running a 5K or taking your dog for a walk – reduces the risk of heart failure and cardiovascular mortality by more than half, which is pretty impressive.
However, researchers also warn it shows that exercise alone isn’t enough to improve cardiovascular outcomes (there is, after all, still a 15% risk of this disease and death in those who sat the longest yet exercised a lot).
"Too much sitting or lying down can be harmful for heart health, even for those who are active," said Shaan Khurshid, MD, MPH, a cardiologist at the Massachusetts General Hospital and co-author of the study. "Future guidelines and public health efforts should stress the importance of cutting down on sedentary time. Avoiding more than 10.6 hours per day may be a realistic minimal target for better heart health."
The Bottom Line
The takeaway from this study should be that spending long periods of the day sitting risks your heart health. While exercise doesn’t absolve your risk, it does help – by quite a lot.
However, this study makes it clear that we need to focus on exercise beyond our time in the gym. All movement helps your health – every time you’re not sitting still you’re further improving your health outcomes.
Focusing less on time spent training and more on time spent sitting might also be a much more accessible way of increasing activity – you don’t need a gym membership, time off your work and caring responsibilities or knowledge of how to properly execute a bicep curl.
An extra 30 minutes of movement a day makes a difference – and we know from exercise snacking research that the benefits come regardless of whether the 30 minutes are continuous or broken down into smaller bites. If you can’t get away from your desk for a full half an hour, could you walk the long way round to the office loo or do burpees when you boil the kettle (that one might be best saved for the days you’re working from home)? It all adds up.
Moving more is a good idea – as long as it fits in with other important parts of life and doesn’t cause you more stress. Less sitting is something we’re lucky to do: if you can, be thankful for your time out of the chair.
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