Are you Sitting Comfortably?

... Then it’s time to face the uncomfortable truth about what it’s doing to you. Kim jones explains

- Kim jones

We commute to work, spend eight hours at our office desks, and at the end of the day drive home or hunch over our tablets on the train. Then it’s time to collapse on the couch and binge watch our favourite series or browse the internet for some shopping. And it’s all done on our derrières.

Statistics show that some of us sit, on average, for a staggering 10 hours a day. And the harsh reality of resting on our rears for so long? It could be killing us. Research links sitting for long periods with a host of health problems. As well as leaving you at risk of poor posture and flexibility, lower back and joint pain, it’s associated with everything from high blood pressure to cardiovascular disease, obesity to type 2 diabetes and even a higher risk of cancer. A comprehensive review of studies on sedentary behaviour, carried out by researchers from the universities of Loughborough and Leicester in the UK, found that – compared with the shortest time spent sitting – the longest time spent sedentary was associated with a 90 percent increase in death from cardiovascular events and a 49 percent increase in death due to any cause.

Who knew sitting could be so scary?

“Being crammed into a chair all day long is as unnatural as eating all day long,” says Dr James A Levine, author of Get Up!, and one of the first health experts to highlight the issue of “sitting disease”.

“Humans were not designed to sit. For thousands of years, we hunted and grew food; we spent most of our lives upright and sat down in short batches only occasionally for a break. Now, however, we’ve converted from an ancient world of movers to a modern world of chair sloths. Sitters die sooner – for every hour you sit, two hours of your life walk away.”