By now we all probably know that we shouldn’t sit glued to our desks all day. However, you might need to stand up a little more often than you think.
A new study published in the Annals of Internal Medicine this week found that sitting for prolonged periods of time, even if you’re a heavy exerciser when you’re not at the office, can be deadly. Researchers suggest that people who have seated jobs get up every 30 minutes to help counter the effects of spending the day seated.
For the study, the team looked at 8,000 Americans over the age of 45 over four years. Participants all wore accelerometers so their movement could be tracked. In general, those that moved around more were more healthy. That was something the group expected. What they didn’t expect was to find a correlation between the death rates of participants and how many hours they went in a day not getting up.
With that, they learned that participants that sat for longer periods of time during the day were more likely to have died during the study, even when they were active outside of those long sitting sessions.
They argue that while sitting, in general, is hazardous to your health, sitting for short periods of time “is the least harmful pattern of accumulation.”