Making Fitness Your Priority

Making Fitness Your Priority

There are a variety of reasons we may be motivated to maintain fitness.  We stay fit for our families, our health, athletic goals, and our looks, among other things.  Despite this obesity has crept up to epidemic status in America.  We need to make fitness a priority!

This week I attended a lecture by this title at work.  The health system I work for is taking on a new initiative to encourage fitness among their employees and many other companies are following suit.  Our modern sedentary lifestyles, both at home and in the workplace, are costly for us and for our employers.  Research has shown that healthier employees are more cost effective not just by being more productive but also by requiring less company expenses in terms of health care.  In fact many employers have taken note and are beginning to implement health insurance discounts for employees who demonstrate better fitness in terms of health markers such as tobacco use, blood pressure, blood glucose, cholesterol, and body mass index. 

The lecture on 'Making Fitness Your Priority' wasn’t just a plug for joining the company

wellness center, it sought to raise awareness of how sedentary many of us are and encouraged making time for physical activity throughout the day instead of just 30 minutes throughout the day before or after work.  According to Genevieve Healy, Ph.D., a research fellow at the Cancer Prevention Research Centre of the University of Queensland in Australia, “We've become so sedentary that 30 minutes a day at the gym may not do enough to counteract the detrimental effects of 8, 9, or 10 hours of sitting”.  Could this be the reason so many people still struggle with weight, blood sugar, and cholesterol woes despite keeping consistent workout routines?

In a recent study, Healy and her colleagues found that regardless of how much moderate to vigorous exercise participants did, those who took more breaks from sitting throughout the day had slimmer waists, lower body mass indexes, and healthier blood fat and blood sugar levels than those who sat the most.

We’re all aware that increasingly sedentary lifestyles have become a problem and working as a DPT I’ve seen first hand how a sedentary lifestyle can negatively impact one’s health, but now we’re finally compiling research to show just how detrimental prolonged sitting can be.

Doctors at the Mayo Clinic are calling this phenomenon "sitting disease" and liken current research into the ill effects of inactivity to the discovery of negative side effects from smoking. "Our bodies have evolved over millions of years to do one thing: move," says James Levine,M.D., Ph.D., of the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, and author of Move a Little, Lose a Lot. "As human beings, we evolved to stand upright. For thousands of generations, our environment demanded nearly constant physical activity." But thanks to technological advances, the internet, and an increasingly longer work week, that environment has disappeared.

A Vanderbilt University study of 6,300 people published in the American Journal of Epidemiology estimated that the average American spends 55% of waking time in sedentary behaviors such as sitting.  That is 7.7 hours per day spent in seated commute, seated work, and seated homelife!!  So chances are, you're reading this article sitting down. And if you're like most computer users, you've been in your chair for a while. PLEASE STAND UP!

Simply by standing, you burn three times as many calories as you do sitting! Muscle contractions, including the ones required for standing, trigger important processes related to the breakdown of fats and sugars.

When you sit for an extended period of time, your body starts to shut down at the metabolic level. When muscles (especially the big ones meant for movement, i.e. quads and gluts) are immobile, your circulation slows, you burn fewer calories, and the key fat-burning enzymes responsible for breaking down triglycerides simply start switching off.  Sit for a full day and those fat burners plummet by 50%!

And that’s not all. The less you move, the less blood sugar your body uses.  Research shows that for every two hours spent sitting, your chance of contracting diabetes goes up by 7%!. Your risk for heart disease goes up, too, because enzymes that keep blood fats in check are inactive. You're also more prone to depression due to less blood flow and consequently fewer feel-good hormones like endorphins circulating to your brain.

Sitting too much is also terrible for your posture and spine health.  When you sit for a prolonged period your hip flexors and hamstrings tighten and your core musculature becomes stiff and weak.  It’s no wonder that the incidence of chronic low back pain has increased threefold since the 1990s!

So if exercise alone isn't the solution, what is?  According to research from Dr. Levine and the Mayo Clinic the answer may be incorporating more non-exercise daily activity in addition to regular exercise aka ramping up your NEAT (non-exercise activity thermogenesis).  NEAT is the energy that you burn doing everything but exercise (folding laundry, tapping your toes, and simply standing up).  In the Mayo Clinic’s study on NEAT, motion sensors were used to track every single step and fidget of 20 people who weren't regular exercisers (half of them were obese; half were not) and after 10 days, they found that the lean participants moved an average of 150 minutes more per day than the overweight people did (enough to burn 350 calories or one cheeseburger). Additionally, Dr. Levine states that "NEAT activity can improve blood flow and increase the amount of serotonin available to the brain, so that your thinking becomes sharper and you'll be less likely to feel depressed."  

Here are 10 ways to move more during your day:

1.  Walk faster.  If there’s just one change you can make to get more fitness out of your days, try to pick up the pace each and every time you walk, whether it’s heading down a hallway, getting to your car, or enjoying nature. Walking at a faster pace burns more calories (nearly 100 more calories per hour), strengthens leg muscles, is great for your heart and lungs, and improves your attitude.

2. Take the stairs. You’ve heard that one a million times, but consider this:  taking the stairs can burn 5x as many calories as riding the elevator.  In fact, climbing stairs for two minutes, five days a week provides the same calorie burn as a 36-minute walk. Consider setting yourself a quota of say, 60 stairs per day; a typical staircase has 10 steps, so that’s six flights. Try going up or down a flight to use the rest rooms on another floor.

3.  Park on the perimeter. You’ve been hearing this one for years, too, but you might be surprised to learn how much exercise you get from leaving your car at the far edge of the parking lot. For example, if you park in the empty spot closest to a store entrance, you’ll walk 25-50 feet to the front door but parking at the far edge of the lot could mean walking 200-300 feet or more. And if you carry your shopping bags instead of using the cart you’ll build some more muscle along the way too.

4.  Go public. Take public transportation more often.  Riding the bus or train to work or other activities requires you to walk more, and the extra movement can have an impressive impact. Commuters in Charlotte, NC, who gave up driving and started taking a new light-rail system, lost more than six pounds in 18 months.

5.  Rearrange the office. The suggestion of installing treadmills at every workstation may not be a reality at your work, but there are a lot of other things you can do.  Move trash cans out of cubicles to make people walk to throw out garbage. Relocate water coolers by windows, where people will want to congregate. Get face-to-face; instead of e-mailing or calling colleagues, walk to their part of the building for some face time when you need to ask a question or solve a work issue.  When you do talk on the telephone, stand up and if possible, walk or pace. Consider trading your desk chair for a large stability ball.  Have walking meetings; skip the conference room, slip on some comfortable walking shoes, grab a small notepad and pen or a voice recorder, and invite colleagues for a stroll.

6. Add 15 minutes of walking to your lunch menu. Whether at work or at home, the typical lunch break lasts 30 to 60 minutes, but eating usually takes just 10 minutes. Spend your extra time walking, not sitting.

7.  Get your groove on.  Dance around while straightening up your house, washing dishes, or brushing your teeth. Dancing is both joyful and healthy; you don’t need a dance floor, special occasion, or even a partner to do it :o)

8.  Limit TV time to 2 hours per day.  In a study among women, the risk for metabolic syndrome (a combination of health woes including high blood pressure, high cholesterol, and high blood sugar) shoots up 26% for every hour per day they spend watching the tube. 

9.  Turn TV time into a workout.  Instead of sprawling out on the couch, try doing a few simple stretches or exercises during tube time. Take it a step further and use commercial breaks during as a chance to rise off the sofa and spend commercial time doing crunches or jumping jacks.

10.  Spend an hour per week outdoors, preferably much more. There’s a direct correlation between fitness levels and the amount of time you spend outdoors versus indoors. People who spend more time outside are more energized, upbeat, and fit. What to do outside? Pull weeds, walk the dog, practice your golf or tennis swing, mulch your flower beds, bird watch, visit a neighbor.

Think of your body as a computer… As long as you're moving the mouse and tapping the keys, all systems are go; but let it idle for a few minutes, and the machine goes into power-conservation mode. Your body is meant to be active, so when you sit and do nothing for too long, it shuts down and burns less energy. Getting consistent activity throughout the day keeps your metabolism in high gear. Fidgeting, standing, and puttering may even keep you off medications and out of the doctor's office!  Try to aim for 10 minutes of NEAT each hour.