For many of us, a sedentary lifestyle is an unavoidable part of modern life. Commuting, relaxing, and (if you have an office job) working are all activities that entail a lot of sitting. Without really realising, you can easily spend the vast majority of your day on your rear at no major inconvenience. According to the NHS, many adults in the UK spend around nine hours a day sitting: the equivalent of 63 hours or two and a half days a week.
This is, unfortunately, a problem. “Prolonged sitting is now recognised as an independent risk factor for poor health,” explains Kelly Mackintosh, a world-renowned researcher in sedentary behaviour and professor of sport and exercise science at Swansea University. “It increases the risk of cardiovascular disease, type 2 diabetes, certain cancers, poorer mental health, and all-cause mortality.”
Part of the reason is mechanical, adds Nell Mead, physiotherapist. “When your leg muscles stay switched off for hours, the contractile activity [movement] that normally helps them take up glucose and break down fat slows right down, and the sitting posture itself compresses the blood vessels in your legs, reducing circulation.” Prolonged sitting can also increase your injury risk, she says: “When you stay still for long periods and then suddenly ask your body to do something high-load or awkward, like lifting something heavy straight after a long stint at a desk, you’re more likely to pick up a muscle strain or disc injury, because the tissues haven’t been primed to move.”
This all sounds terrible, but perhaps, like me, you’ve assumed you are avoiding the major pitfalls by exercising regularly. I commute by electric bike, take the stairs, strength-train frequently and run at least once a week. Health-wise, I feel like I’m in good nick and so haven’t really worried about my extensive career of sitting.
But frequent exercise, it turns out, has not saved me from the perils of sedentaryism.
“Even if you meet the recommended physical activity guidelines (or excel!), it doesn’t fully cancel out the harm of sitting still for 10-plus hours a day,” Mackintosh says. “This is sometimes called the ‘active couch potato effect’… the two behaviours [sedentary time and exercise time] act fairly independently on the body. It’s part of why public health guidance has shifted from just ‘be more active’ to also ‘sit less, move more.’”
One suggested solution is “movement snacking” – small bits of easy movement at regular intervals. Unlike exercise snacking, which includes more formalised movements (walking up stairs, bodyweight squats, stretching, etc.), movement snacking is as simple as a short, five-minute walk. And according to one recent study, when done every hour it can offset the damage of being seated for long periods. Plus, the study found it boosted mood and reduced fatigue, with no effect on work performance.
“Physically, a short walk reactivates the leg muscles’ glucose and fat metabolism and relieves the compression in the lower limb blood vessels caused by sitting,” Mead says, while the walk also works psychologically like a reset button, explaining the instant improvements in fatigue and mood.
Movement snacking can also improve your baseline fitness, keeping you moving for longer: “Poor cardiorespiratory or muscular endurance is a known risk factor for injury, as less fit people work at a higher percentage of their maximum capacity and fatigue faster. Fatigue changes movement patterns in ways that load tissues that aren’t used to it. So the fitness gains from exercise snacking aren’t just about feeling more energetic; they plausibly reduce injury risk too.”
Rather than keeping you away from your desk, research shows it can boost productivity. Mead points to a study of orthopaedic surgeons who hold long, awkward, static positions during operations. “It found that giving them short movement and stretching breaks meaningfully reduced their discomfort and fatigue and improved their focus, without lengthening surgery time. If it works mid-operation, it’s a good sign it’ll work at a desk.”
Having tried it, I can confirm it had no significant impact on productivity while significantly cheering me up. Every hour in the office, I would take a circuit of the floors to get my bones moving. I was slightly self-conscious of these walks as I ran out of different paths. I worried what my colleagues would think of the sheepish brunette repeatedly wandering past them.
But it really did help with my focus, mood, and energy levels, particularly when I didn’t fall prey to my phone on my little walks. If I succumbed to a delicious scroll, I found my brain was just as muddled by the time I got back to my desk.
By the afternoon, I had happily settled into this routine: getting down to business for an hour before sauntering to the kitchen/bathroom/canteen/fire exit and back. I found myself instinctively rolling my shoulders, which probably further released tension, and when I returned, I found it far easier to sit with better posture.
When I tried this at home, it was a bit more of a struggle, thanks to the heatwave. My mind was getting foggy just from sitting in the heat and so a walk around did not make me more refreshed. It did, however, give me more structure – and I still got all my work done.
Even if you cannot have breaks as often as recommended, it will still be effective, Mackintosh says.
“Hardly anyone hits ‘perfect’ adherence (in the study only around a tenth of people in the most frequent group managed to stick rigidly to their target), so don’t be discouraged if you miss some breaks. Even partial adherence showed real benefit. And classic sitting-related issues like lower back stiffness, post-meal blood sugar spikes and leg heaviness are exactly the kind of thing a five-minute walk is well suited to interrupt.”
Whether this made me fitter I couldn’t possibly say. But it certainly made me feel better, making it easy to stick to. In the long term, that can only be a good thing for my health.