We all know that sedentary is harmful, but how long is it?

For many people, sedentary is almost inevitable.

We need to be sedentary in the face of computer work, students’ school exams, chess and cards and other entertainment… Even we who write this popular science article need to be sedentary.

Long term sedentary, often accompanied by increasing weight, muscle, circulation, metabolism… A series of body functions may be affected.

Since we all know that being sedentary is not good. But how long is sedentary?

how long is sedentary?

This problem is actually there is no any standard answer.

For different people, the longest sitting time that the body can bear is not the same. Different researchers are not the same time in their respective experiments.

A study conducted by American Cancer Society found that long-term sitting is the same as other varied reasons, will result in an increase in mortality.

This study will be defined for a long time sitting as: a total of 6 hours and more time for sitting.

6 hours sitting is really not rare. During the 8 hours of working a day or more than 8 hours of learning, we have to sit most time. Most people have such experience. 

But American scholars have found that sitting longer than 10 hours increases cardiovascular risk.

Sounds like it’s not sedentary as long as you don’t reach the time limit here?

Of course not.

According to the advice of some authoritative institutions, the time for sitting without obvious harm may also be very short.

For example, the American Diabetes Association’s study points out that sitting for more than 30 minutes should get up and exercise. If you sit in a posture for more than 30 minutes, it will be harmful to maintain your blood sugar.

Here’s a special reminder for those who like to sit on the sofa and chase dramas: it may be more dangerous to always sit watching TV than to work.

Office workers who have to be sedentary every day may have other health habits to reduce the harm of sedentary, such as regular exercise.

But if a person has a lot of leisure time, but basically take time to watch TV, most of the overall health habits are not very good, may be more prone to other problems.

Some researchers have done a prospective cohort study on the relationship between adult TV watching time and the incidence of type 2 diabetes. They have found that:

The probability of diabetes increases by 9.2% every 1 hours of watching TV every day. If you sit watching TV for more than 4 hours a day, excluding some common causes of confusion, such as age and body mass index, the risk of diabetes is about 1.5 times that of people who watch TV for less than 1 hours.

How to save the dangers of long time sitting? 

It’s a pity that the harm of long-term sedentary is hard to recover.

More and more studies have found that sedentary is an independent risk factor.

Independent risk means that even if we try to exclude physiological indicators such as age, gender and body mass index, as well as social indicators such as income and education, and observe the impact of sedentary on health without interference, we can also find that sedentary is not conducive to health.

Sedentary people, regardless of regular exercise, are at increased risk of heart disease, diabetes, cancer and premature death.

So I still want to emphasize the previous words, everyone should reduce the sitting time.

But isn’t exercise totally useless? No.

First of all, as long as you can exercise and spend more time doing exercise, you will naturally spend less time sitting.

So it is very recommended that you do everything you want to do!

When watching TV: you can squat, raise dumbbell, turn hula hoop, use treadmill, treadmill… In a word, don’t just sit there.

When working: set a small alarm clock, every hour or even half an hour, leave your seat to drink water, go to the bathroom, or look at the beautiful scenery and beauties in the distance, or work in a combination of standing and sitting.

Second, the American Heart Association suggests that even low-intensity exercise can offset some of the health risks of sedentary heart disease.

Exercise time and intensity can be gradually enhanced, do not all of a sudden too intense and long-term exercise.

Adults should have at least 150 minutes of moderate intensity aerobic exercise a week, such as jogging and swimming, for at least 10 minutes at a time.

Of course, it is also possible to replace the high-strength aerobic movement of 75 minutes, and should ensure that the muscle strength of the muscle force is enhanced at least twice a week.

“Medium intensity” here, including fast walking, dancing, etc., “high strength”, including running, fast riding, fast swimming and moving weight.

It sounds not difficult? However, according to the WHO past data, there is a person who does not reach this health minimum standard every 5 people.

Do you meet the standard?

Finally, in order to avoid some smart friends drilling the empty space, we want to emphasize:

It’s no good sitting for a long time, even worse lying for a long time!

The damage of sedentary is due to too little movement and substandard activity time. Lying down is nothing more than changing posture and keeping motionless for a long time. The same is a very low amount of exercise, the same is not conducive to health.

Remember, life is about exercise and health is about not being lazy.