The Case Against Sitting

We Spend Most of our Lives Sitting, and It’s Bad

If you are like many people, you spend most of your workday sitting in a chair, either behind a desk or behind the wheel of a vehicle.  If you are like most people, you spend a lot of time sitting in your car – almost an hour every workday just commuting, in fact.  Finally, if you are like most people, you spend most of your leisure time sitting down in a chair – while locked up inside and looking at a digital screen for good measure.  

None of that is natural, and none of it is good for you.  Humans are not designed to spend most of their waking lives sitting in a chair or a car seat.  Hunter-gatherers and other traditional societies have a lot of leisure time and certainly don’t intentionally work out, but they don’t spend hours a day sitting in a chair.  What if you live in a small space or work an office job?  It’s still possible to add more movement into your day and live in accord with your ancient hunter-gatherer heritage. Let’s look at why being sedentary is bad and what you can do about it.  

Ancestral Perspective on Sitting and Movement

Of course, we don’t know exactly how ancient humans lived and moved.  It is a reasonable surmise that extant hunter-gatherer populations – especially those known to be in generally good health – are living in a way more in line with our ancient ancestors than the average sedentary office-worker is.  For example, the Hadza tribe of Tanzania have been very extensively studied, and are known to suffer from far lower rates of chronic diseases such as obesity and heart disease than modern Western populations. 

Interestingly, the Hadza have both high levels of activity and high levels of inactivity.  Studies that put FitBit-style devices on Hadza tribe members and follow them around show interesting results.  The average Hadza gets a lot of physical activity, averaging around 15,000 steps a day and more than 150 minutes of moderate-or-intense activity a day – official recommendations in the US recommend this much physical activity a week. Most of this activity is of light or moderate intensity. High intensity movement makes up less than 10% of their activity.  

However, despite being so active the Hadza do spend a lot of time resting.  Researchers found that the Hadza spent about nine waking hours everyday in a nonambulatory (non-walking, that is, resting) state.  This is comparable to the daily time spent sitting in modern Western nations.  Yet, the Hadza spend very little of this time sitting in chairs with backs, as we spend most of our resting time doing.  Most of this nonambulatory time is spent squatting, kneeling, lying down, or sitting directly on the ground.  Many of these resting postures, unlike sitting in a chair, involve continuous activation of the big muscles of the legs and core.  Thus, even when they are resting, the Hadza’s large muscles are still active.  

The research on the Hadza reinforces the idea that modern sedentary lifestyles do not correspond to the environment that humans are adapted to live in.  The lack of movement itself is a problem – most of us could benefit from higher daily step counts and more physical activity (although perhaps less intense activity – high intensity exercise is stressful on the body and makes up only a small percentage of the Hadza’s daily total).  The problem is not just a lack of exercise, though.  It is the postures we adopt when we are not exercising.  Humans naturally adopt a multitude of resting postures, most of which still engage big muscle groups.  Sitting in a chair doesn’t do that.  

The Bad Effects of Being Sedentary

It’s not just that sitting is a biological mismatch for us, though.  There is also direct evidence that the more time we spend sitting, the less healthy we are.  Studies find a strong dose-dependent correlation between hours a day spent sitting and all-cause mortality.

Increasing exercise while remaining sedentary does not necessarily fully counteract the negative health outcomes of a sedentary lifestyle – studies show that only those who far exceeded official exercise guidelines were able to “out-exercise” their sedentary lifestyle.  Indeed, some studies show that even in the highest tier of exercise levels, exercise cannot fully counteract the bad effects of sitting.  While exercising more may be a good idea, don’t use the fact that you exercise a lot as an excuse to avoid addressing your sedentary lifestyle.  The evidence is pretty strong that most people (especially those who don’t have the time or inclination to become exercise-aholics) stand to benefit the most from both increasing their exercise time and decreasing their sitting time.  So why not work on both?

There are several possible reasons for why spending long periods of time sitting is bad for your health.  When it comes to muscles, the saying “use it or lose it” really is true.  Your body wants to be efficient – if it thinks you are never using a muscle, it will not waste resources maintaining it.  Unlike squatting, standing, and other resting postures (such as those used by the Hadza), sitting in a chair engages almost none of your body’s major muscle groups.  This means that the big muscles used to support your trunk and maintain your posture, such as your core, back, and legs, get very little use and consequently start to atrophy. (Although how you sit in a chair can partially counteract that – we’ll talk more about that later).    

Furthermore, low level muscle engagement, such as from standing, gentle walking, or squatting, requires a constant stream of cellular energy.  This muscle exertion can help your muscles act as sponges that “soak up” glucose in your bloodstream and keep glucose levels low.  In addition, there is some preliminary evidence that consistent low-level engagement of these big muscles can help to upregulate fat metabolism, leading to greater metabolic flexibility and overall metabolic health.

What Can I Do?

So, spending prolonged periods of time sitting is a biological mismatch for our physiology, and there is good evidence that it harms our health in a variety of ways.  What can you do about it?

Although exercise has quite a few health benefits, it won’t necessarily prevent the bad effects of a sedentary lifestyle.  Long stretches of time spent sitting appear to be actively harmful to health, not merely neutral time that could be better spent.  Remember, the Hadza spend just as much time in nonambulatory (non-walking) time as we do – the difference is what they do when they are not walking.  So, here are some practical ways to mix up your nonambulatory time.

• Find non-sitting leisure activities.  On average, Americans spend about five hours a day in leisure time, and four of those hours are spent sitting.  Considering that this data is from 2019, those numbers are probably even worse now with the rise of smartphones.   You may work at a desk and not have much control of your work environment, but you do have more control over how you spend your free time.  Make a point of finding ways of staying active and getting outside!  Focusing on finding enjoyable things to do other than staring at a TV, phone, or computer screen has benefits other than helping to keep you more active.  It also provides more opportunity for human connection, gives your eyes and brain a break from screens, and gets you outside in the sunshine, which has all sorts of beneficial health effects.  

• Get a standing desk.  Standing for long periods of time may not be ideal, but it does engage your big leg and trunk muscles more than sitting – and, if sitting is your default, it also helps give your muscles the opportunity to work in different positions.  If you are not used to standing for long periods of time, build up your standing time gradually – starting by just standing for a few minutes and then going back to sitting.  As your muscles get used to it, you can gradually increase the length of your standing periods.  Standing desks range from about $100 up to multiple thousand dollar versions.  If you are like me and don’t want to pay a lot of money for a standing desk, you can just stack books, boxes, or something else on your regular desk to adjust the height.  Not the most elegant solution, but it works.  If you are working at home, you can stand at the kitchen counter or another tall piece of furniture while you work.

• Break up your work time with microbreaks.  Not only is it bad for your muscles to stay in a sitting position for hours on end, it is also bad for your eyes and your mental health to stare at a computer screen for hours on end without breaks.  If you find yourself working at a desk, try to take your eyes off your computer and look at something far away (out the window or at least at the far end of the room) for at least twenty seconds every twenty minutes.  Try to get up and move every hour.  This could be a five minute walk outside, or even a walk down to the hall to go to the bathroom or grab a cup of coffee – just throw a few extra laps in!  If you can, see if you can go on a ten or twenty minute walk on your lunch break.  Even just standing up and taking a few squats or walking in place is better than nothing. 

• Try to adopt different resting postures.  This may be easier to do at home than work, but try to incorporate resting postures other than sitting into your routine.  Watch young kids playing and look at all the postures they adopt: they squat, kneel, and sit on the ground effortlessly.  It might not be effortless for you, but see if you can start spending some of your resting time (perhaps watching a movie, working on a puzzle or boardgame, or playing with your kids or your dog) on the floor.  See how different squatting, ground-sitting, and kneeling postures feel.  If your joints are not used to the effort, go slowly, and obviously hold off if your joints are bad.  

• If you must sit in a chair, focus on good posture.  The general principle is that the more your core muscles need to work to hold your body in position, the better.  Sitting on a stool or bench without a back is better than a chair with a back, and a hard wooden chair with a back is better than a soft chair or couch.  When you sit on a chair, hold your back straight and sit forward – don’t lean back into the back of the chair.  This way, your core muscles still need to do the work of supporting you.  

• Finally, track your steps.  Seeing how many steps you get a day, and trying to set new personal records, can be a very motivating way to get more general movement throughout the day.  There isn’t really any research behind 10,000 steps a day being the magic number.  The Hadza averaged 15,000 a day – but you can certainly get benefits well below that number.  A good rule of thumb is that you want, as a bare minimum, more than 4,000 steps – but you really want at least 8,000.  Many smartphones have a pedometer app, but, if you are low-tech like me, you can also get a clip-on pedometer from Amazon or Walmart for between $12 and $14.  (Although you should be warned that cheap pedometers don’t last forever in my experience!)

What methods do you use to get more movement throughout the day?  Let me know in the comments!