Prolonged Sitting: How Long Should You Sit For Before Your Back Hurts?
This post was originally published on airawear.com.
When you’re drained from most activities, sitting down seems like a pretty good way to take a break. 10 to 15 minutes, tops.
But what if you have to sit at a desk — required by your job especially — for hours on end?
Sitting no longer serves you the way it was supposed to (especially before the 19th century). Instead…
… It has transformed into a bad guy. A villain plotting against you.
Prolonged sitting is like a really passive-aggressive Bane. You know, he kinda breaks your back but doesn’t really want to do it directly either. He basically waits for you to notice you’ve already done his job after a really long time.
Prolonged sitting. A necessary evil.
You see, we are creatures built not for excess but moderation.
Observe how much of the following we all do: sleeping, working, eating, having sex, using the computer… Even the most pleasurable activities have their limits too.
And if we go overboard, we tend to face some negative consequences on the body. The same goes for how long we sit.
To begin, we have to understand what happens when we’re sitting for so long.
Let’s just say we’ve been tracking your sitting duration (even if it’s not yours you can imagine how likely this scenario is):
- You work 9 to 5, or at least 8 hours a day
- You also spend 2 hours a day travelling to and from work (let’s say you get to sit)
- Another 10 to 15 minutes on the toilet
- 1 hour for lunch and dinner each
- And you want to relax at home for at least 1 hour before you go to bed
That’s a minimum of 15 hours and 15 minutes on your butt. Even if you stand while commuting, you’re still sitting for at least 13 hours a day. (That’s more than our sleeping hours, just FYI.)
And guess what, recent findings show that we spend MORE THAN 50% of our waking hours sitting down anyway.
The effects of prolonged sitting can be a long list.
But instead of info-dumping all the science on you, just know that the following happens to you on a musculoskeletal level:
Sounds like a lot to pay for, just by sitting down for too long. Well, the reality is this: it’s difficult to avoid sitting a lot in an industrialized world.
Well, according to research in 2012… Exercise doesn’t necessarily negate the effects of sitting.
Dr Genevieve Healy, a researcher from University of Queensland states that,
“Studies using sophisticated molecular biology and medical chemistry methodologies have found that exercise and physical inactivity change the body in different, unique ways.”
What she’s saying is that the effects of exercise is independent from the effects of prolonged sitting. You may exercise often and frequent but if you stick to your chair for the rest of the day, your exercise won’t prevent the effects of sitting too long.
In addition, she also emphasizes that
“… There is new evidence on the importance of avoiding too much time in sedentary behaviors.”
More recently, in 2016, Ulf Ekelund and his team released their research results. Here’s what they found.
If you’ve been doing “high levels of moderate intensity physical activity (i.e. about 60–75 min per day)”, according to Prof. Ekelund and team… Then exercise can eliminate the increased risk of death related to long sitting hours.
While that’s optimistic, an hour of daily exercise is an awful lot for most of us. Not everybody has that discipline to exercise that much everyday.
The fact that she dressed for the occasion beats half the people I know.
Furthermore, let’s go back to the one thing we are concerned with.
It’s the relationship between how long you sit and when your back starts to hurt.
Even though it’s a tedious effort to avoid sitting a lot (depending on your job nature)…
How we sit and how we approach the whole concept of sitting are things that we can easily deal with.
So…
A more sensible way of approaching “how long do we sit” is this:
How long should I be sitting for at one go?
This approach immediately removes the backward-as-a-Neanderthal notion that “I CANNOT SIT AT ALL OR I WILL DIE.”
Dude. That was uncalled for.
It may seem common sense or intuitive, but standing for 9 hours isn’t the answer either. Just ask anybody who has worked as a shop assistant for at least 3 months.
It’s not a matter of how long you sit (or stand) in total.
It’s what you do in between that makes it manageable. Just as how you don’t eat your 3 square meals at one go in the morning, you can learn to deal with sitting in a similar approach.
On second thought, you CAN do this in one go.
Right now, there’s no formula or solid evidence regarding what’s the longest duration before you start to feel your back ache.
On one hand, it’s true that everyone has a different body. So the ideal answer can differ among people.
Furthermore, there are too many other factors to consider. What position(s) are you adopting? How healthy are you? How long are your working hours? Which industry do you work in? How soft is your chair that you sit down?
Whether there’s an ideal sitting duration or not… This is for researchers and self-experimenters to find out.
Instead, what you can follow is a general rule of thumb. Something that’s easy for you to remember. And easy to key in into your own alarm clocks.
The rule of thumb? Sit for a maximum of 30 minutes at one go.
Even sources like the National Health Service of UK, Pain Science and even Dr. Mercola are also recommending the same duration for sitting down.
But what makes this 30 minute mark useful comes from the fact that it coincides with other lifestyle habits (more on than in the next segment).
We also recommend that you take a break for 5 good minutes.
Stretching, brainstorming, taking a walk, enjoying AiraWear (yep), relieving yourself…
But it’s understandable that you can’t and won’t micromanage your own breaks. Who actually times their break to the second?
Even a 1 to 3 minute break will be sufficient…
As long as you-
Okay, great. I just have to not sit during my walking breaks right?
Yes and no.
Yes, you are not going to sit down. But also, you can’t just stand.
As I was saying above, a 1–3 minute break can be enough for you. But,
During your breaks, you MUST walk around.
You’re not just taking a break from work and sitting. You’re taking a break from being in a static position. To truly take a break, you have to *stop* doing what you’re doing… Which is being in a static position.
So you have to move your entire body. Stretching won’t be enough. Standing for 10 seconds and sitting again won’t be enough.
The reason for this specific intermittent sitting habit can be succinctly put as such:
“Breaking up sitting time engages your muscles and bones, and gives all our bodily functions a boost — a bit like revving a car’s engine.”
– Professor David Dunstan, the Baker IDI Heart and Diabetes Institute
Coincidentally, a famous productivity technique also encourages you to work in 25 minute bursts with breaks in between. And there are even alternative work cycles that you can try out to see what suits your tastes better.
So, not only will you have a better back…
You can watch as your productivity blazes through the roof.
And finally, you triumph over the villain of today’s post: Sedentary lifestyle. And you also overcome its little gang of negative side effects.
When you move around after 30 minutes of “non-stop intensive” sitting, this happens to you:
- You reduce the risk of back pain that comes from sitting too long
- You raise your metabolic rate up by 3 times (and accumulate less fat): while sitting, you burn calories at 1/minute, but walking boosts it back to 3/minute
- Stay away from that damned risk of type 2 diabetes
- Strengthen the back and hip muscles that have been neglected after years of prolonged sitting
- Improve the strength and vitality of your legs
- Gain a healthier set of organs: your heart, brain, lungs, digestive system will all be grateful to you
If you suspect that you won’t take any action after reading this, you might be right to assume so.
After all, with work and other commitments in your way, how can you ensure that you will stick to 30-minute work/5-minute break intervals?
Fortunately for you, we’ve anticipated this challenge of commitment. And there’s one solution lying right in front of you right now:
All you need to do is download the above, and follow the steps inside (they’re really, really, really simple).
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Originally published at airawear.com on January 4, 2017.
