You probably don’t need this reminder but it’s important to reiterate: Sitting for long stretches at a time can lead to real physical and mental health problems, as we’ve highlighted over the years. Sitting for hours at a time can negatively affect your heart, joints, muscles, blood vessels, and mental health. The longer you sit, the higher your risk for negative health outcomes. Data continues to mount about how excessive sitting can harm your health and well-being, and how reducing your daily sedentary time can help lower risks for diseases such as diabetes, high blood pressure, or cardiovascular disease.  

For example, research tells us that older adults typically sit for 65-80% of their awake time each day. But for older adults with obesity or chronic health conditions, recent research has demonstrated that reducing your sitting time by even 30 minutes a day could produce a measurable improvement in your blood pressure. For those with diabetes, sitting for long periods each day raises your risk of mortality. If instead, you counter that excessive sitting with physical activity that meets recommended exercise guidelines, you’ll offset that elevated risk and reduce your chances of premature death. And for those of you with back pain, new research out of Finland reports that just a little less sitting each day can forestall increased back pain. This study demonstrated that those in an intervention group who sat less and moved more were able to keep their back pain from progressing compared to a control group whose sitting remained the same and whose back pain significantly increased over 6 months. While standing up and moving are the usually recommended counters to excessive sitting, there is an interesting new study that found that coffee drinking may also lower your health risks from excessive sitting. It’s not clear what elements of drinking coffee are leading to this outcome, but it does provide some measure of comfort that starting your day sitting down with a cup of coffee may not be such a bad use of your time. To find out more, order that cappuccino and click here.

So, is standing up every so often the solution to lowering the health risks from excessive sitting? Or do you need to do more than stand?  New research published in the International Journal of Epidemiology, out of Australia, sheds light on whether standing is enough to counteract the negative effects of excessive sitting. According to this new research, while long periods of sitting can harm your cardiovascular health, just standing up instead may not reduce or fix the harmful effects of sitting. According to this research, merely replacing sitting with standing, especially for long periods (such as a standing desk) will not offset the risks of a sedentary lifestyle and will itself put you at risk for other negative health effects, such as blood pooling in the legs, and an increased risk for swollen veins and blood clots that may arise from excessive standing. Excessive standing is, in essence, as harmful to your health as excessive sitting. For more on this research move away from your standing desk and click here and here.

It appears, then, that there’s simply no way of getting around the fact that being still, either by sitting or standing, may harm your health and that movement is an essential element for healthier aging. How much movement? Experts vary in their recommendations, with some suggesting at a minimum you add movement or physical activity to your day for 15-20 minutes to counteract your sitting, while others recommend you at a minimum stick to the recommended guidelines of at least 150 minutes of moderate to intense physical activity each week. But perhaps if you want to figure out the ideal amount and type of movement specifically for your body and life, you may want to take a look at the new movement workbook from biomechanical movement expert Katie Bowman, who recently published My Perfect Movement Plan: The Move Your DNA All Day Workbook, which should help you assess your movement needs, develop a plan and get you off the couch and moving toward better health.