Wednesday AM: 3.2 miles, no strength
It was nice reading the comments on yesterday's post regarding preferential time of day for working out! It was SO nice to get an AM workout in today before work. It really jump-started my day!
And not to single anyone out but ihearteggs you & I have the same love interest...just saying.
So on to my post...
(From NY Times)
James Levine, a researcher at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn., has an intense interest in how much people move — and how much they don’t. He is a leader of an emerging field that some call inactivity studies, which has challenged long-held beliefs about human health and obesity.....
People don’t need the experts to tell them that sitting around too much could give them a sore back or a spare tire. The conventional wisdom, though, is that if you watch your diet and get aerobic exercise at least a few times a week, you’ll effectively offset your sedentary time. A growing body of inactivity research, however, suggests that this advice makes scarcely more sense than the notion that you could counter a pack-a-day smoking habit by jogging. “Exercise is not a perfect antidote for sitting,” says Marc Hamilton, an inactivity researcher at the Pennington Biomedical Research Center...
The posture of sitting itself probably isn’t worse than any other type of daytime physical inactivity, like lying on the couch watching “Wheel of Fortune.” But for most of us, when we’re awake and not moving, we’re sitting. This is your body on chairs: Electrical activity in the muscles drops — “the muscles go as silent as those of a dead horse,” Hamilton says — leading to a cascade of harmful metabolic effects. Your calorie-burning rate immediately plunges to about one per minute, a third of what it would be if you got up and walked. Insulin effectiveness drops within a single day, and the risk of developing Type 2 diabetes rises. So does the risk of being obese. The enzymes responsible for breaking down lipids and triglycerides — for “vacuuming up fat out of the bloodstream,” as Hamilton puts it — plunge, which in turn causes the levels of good (HDL) cholesterol to fall.
Read more here
WOW.
While most of us that have desk jobs (myself included), don't have desks that look like this:
...although, that would be pretty amazing!
I don't know about you, but some days I can just feel my butt getting bigger.
womp, womp
We can make little adjustments that would help lower this inactivity level:
- Set a goal to get up and walk around every 10 / 20 / 30 minutes
- Drink more water - which in turn causes you to get up more for refills & to use the potty :)
- Wear a pedometer - 10,000 steps a day should be your goal!
- Trade out that desk chair for a physioball
- Keep the snacking to a minimum - often feelings of hunger are our bodies way of signaling thirst. If you do crave a snack, make sure it's hunger & not boredom.
- Practice some core exercises - flexing & releasing
Do you have a desk job? If you do, what steps do you take to avoid sitting all day?
In other fitness news:
I suck at pull-ups...plainly put. I don't know if it's just due to me not having enough upper body strength or if it's due to the fact that I do not trust our pull-up bar & fear it's going to drop me flat on my tookus. Regardless....I found this & now I'm challenging myself to complete it! So the fact that I just made that challenge PUBLIC...should keep me accountable :)
4 comments:
I saw something a year or so ago on 60/60 about jobs like that. Where people walk slowly while working. They burn an additional 800 calories a day walking at like 1 or 2 mph. I would LOVE to have that at my desk.
I don't do anything to avoid sitting all day, although my workouts are usually very intense or long, so I try to even it out.
Sometimes I wish I had a job where I was on my feet all day just to be more active.
I do work at a desk, I'm a parelegal, although I am constanly getting up all day long, going to the fax machine, the atty's office, etc...so it would definitely be interesting to wear a pedometer and see how many steps I take. Good job on the morning workout!
Yikes!! Scary!
I do drink a TON during the day, so I am running to the bathroom every 45 minutes. I hope that helps, ha!
Super happy I found your blog. I'm a new follower, I hope you will as well. I started my blog a little over a month ago. It's all about celebrity fashion from the point of view of an LA stylist. Stop by to see multiple post a day on all the latest celebrity fashion news and check out pictures from the fall/winter preview I attended yesterday in Beverly Hills. Would love your support. xoxo
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