Can Active Sitting Save Your Health and Your Spine?
By adding some activity to the way we sit, we might be able to mitigate the negative effects of our seated lifestyle
Sit down
In the 1960s, a marketing campaign for a pedometer launched the idea that we need 10,000 steps to be healthy (the device was called Manpo-kei, which roughly translates into ‘10,000 step meter’).
It caught on. Almost all modern fitness trackers have 10k steps baked into their initial settings.
While the origin of the 10k step mania might have been a great marketing ploy, it’s hard to deny that — in general — our lives have become more sedentary. We wake up, sit in a car, sit in an office, and sit in front of the tv. Homo sedens, the seated human.
And it’s not doing us a lot of favors. Sedentary time is correlated with increased all-cause and cardiovascular disease mortality risk and detrimental changes in cardio-metabolic and inflammatory biomarkers. In fact, unless you reduce your caloric intake, sitting down for one day already affects insulin action.
The decrease in physical activity that is a corollary of more sedentary time is also associated with narrower intervertebral disks and weaker paraspinal muscles (the muscles…
