If you do already manage to fit in regular gym workouts, or a game of football once a week, you can stop feeling smug now. <\/p>\n
Plenty of us are what Blodgett calls “active couch potatoes”.<\/p>\n
Of course those activities are “a good thing” she says, but they won’t make up for sitting all day at work staring at a screen or spending the evening slouching on the couch.<\/p>\n
“Thirty minutes in the gym is only a tiny part of it”, she points out. “What about the other 23-and-a-half hours?”<\/p>\n
If that is you, she advises:<\/p>\n
Standing up – get up from your desk regularly<\/p>\n
Going for a walk – use half your lunchtime for a leg stretch instead of looking at your phone<\/p>\n
Meetings on the go – think West Wing, walk and talk. This works for a lot of phone meetings too<\/p>\n
The evidence suggests sitting only for very short periods is best. <\/p>\n
“Every 15, 30 minutes, can you stand up, shake around, sit back down?” says Blodgett.<\/p>\n
This does not mean you should quit the gym.<\/p>\n
There is still a hierarchy, with higher intensity activity, that raises the heart rate, still offering the biggest fitness and health gains, followed by moderate activity such as walking, says Blodgett.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"If you do already manage to fit in regular gym workouts, or a game of football once a…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":403341,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[46],"tags":[6647,102,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-403340","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-fitness","tag-fitness","tag-health","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/403340","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=403340"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/403340\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/403341"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=403340"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=403340"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=403340"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}