Sedentary Behavior

Can you out train a desk job?

I used to laugh at companies that listed sedentary behavior in the form of the ability to sit for eight or more hours a day as a job requirement.

Since this is something most of us had already been doing for many years to educate ourselves enough to be considered for the very jobs we were applying for, listing it as a job requirement seemed fairly redundant.

What I didn’t know then was how much sitting for more than eight hours a day could negatively impact your health, dramatically increasing your risk of developing cardio metabolic syndrome or lifestyle diseases like diabetes or even cancer.

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Fast forward a decade or so and those same companies bitch and moan about the high cost of health care. These are costs associated with lifestyle disease, when you have scientific proof that sitting for long periods of time increases the likelihood of being diagnosed with one of these high-cost lifestyle diseases.

Do you see the problem here?

You’re telling me it’s a requirement of the job to potentially damage my health, but then you’re going to put it on me to lower your costs of paying for my healthcare, that you are making it so I need?

And that doesn’t even touch on the muscle degradation and weakness that can occur as a result of the same sedentary behaviors.

This issue is one of the biggest things that makes fitness different after 35: The long-term effects of sedentary living.

If you’ve had a desk job since your early twenties, at this point you’ve been doing the nine to five gig for ten to fifteen years.

And those negative impacts on your health have been accumulating that entire time.

By your late thirties, even if you’re fortunate enough to have avoided diagnoses like obesity, high blood pressure, and metabolic syndrome, it’s far less likely that you’ve managed to outrun the musculoskeletal impacts of your career choice.

This came as something of a shock to me. As someone who has prioritized exercise my entire adult life, and in my thirties learned about nutrition and started prioritizing what I put into my body as well, I was surprised when I started noticing things like muscle weakness, stiffness, and lower back pain once I cleared 35.

And none of the work I’ve done in the time since has seemed to attenuate these symptoms.

So it got me wondering: Can you out train a desk job?

Popularized studies have examined how much physical activity per day is needed to reduce the risk of various lifestyle diseases. Most of these studies have found that 30 to 40 minutes of moderate to vigorous physical activity per day can reduce those risk factors.

But since I’ve been meeting or exceeding that threshold for several years, I decided to dig deeper.

What I found was a paper examining the prevalence of metabolic syndrome in adults, not through its association with physical activity levels, but with the lack thereof.

In other words, the authors studied how the risk of being diagnosed with metabolic syndrome increased with sedentary behavior, rather than looking at how risk levels may decrease with physical activity.

While the results of their analysis did support previous findings that increased levels of physical activity reduces the risk of metabolic syndrome, they also turned up something very interesting:

“…our results suggest that measuring participation in physical activity and measuring sedentary behavior provide independent measures of the activity spectrum of individuals and may provide independent information about the risk of future disease. Further, at higher levels of inactivity, the inverse association between physical activity and the metabolic syndrome was attenuated.”

What that means is that sedentary behavior may be its own risk factor in whether you develop lifestyle diseases, independent of whether or not you participate in the recommended amount of daily activity. And that last note was especially surprising: “at higher levels of inactivity, the inverse association between physical activity and the metabolic syndrome was attenuated.” What that means is that the principle that getting more exercise can reduce your risk of metabolic syndrome becomes less true as your time spent in sedentary behaviors increases.

One article even suggested that if you’re sitting for more than ten hours per day, even an hour-long daily workout isn’t enough to counteract it.

And this was the ah-ha moment that answered my question.

Can you out train a desk job? The answer, it seems, is no.

Because even if you’re meeting or exceeding the recommended amount of daily activity, if you’re still spending a significant amount of time being sedentary, that sedentary time will put you at risk.

Naively, I still thought I was doing okay. There was no way I was sedentary for ten hours a day.

If you deduct eight hours per day for sleep, which is not included as sedentary activity for purposes of these studies, that means that if I was sitting around for ten hours or more per day that I would only be active for six.

And thinking through my average day, I believed that I was getting up an down with enough frequency to confidently say that I was nowhere near that ten-hour threshold.

So I decided to track it.

I carried my notebook around with me for a day and wrote down a timestamp whenever I sat down. This included activities like tv time, reading, working, scrolling through my phone, and editing this podcast. Whenever I got up for any kind of activity, I took note of the time and calculated how long I’d been sedentary.

At the end of what I thought had been a rather hectic day of running errands and doing household chores, I had still racked up eight total hours of sedentary time.

And the really scary thing was that this occurred on a day that I’d taken the afternoon off from my desk job. I didn’t even want to think about what a full work day would have looked like!

So instead I tried to do this on a Saturday that I found myself free of obligations, full of confidence that I could keep myself busy and active enough to keep sedentary time to a minimum.

But I stopped tracking when I’d exceeded 4 hours of sedentary behavior by 2pm, afraid of what the day’s total might look like if I kept at it.

Clearly my time spent on sedentary behaviors was far exceeding what I’d thought.

And while to this point I’ve been fortunate enough to escape diagnosis for any lifestyle diseases, I most certainly have experienced the muscular degeneration and weakness from it.

And I started to strongly suspect that this was at least partially to blame for the lack of results I was seeing from my diet and exercise programming.

This is why fitness over 35 is different, guys! This is exactly what I was talking about in the pilot episode of this podcast when I said that fitness influencers are fundamentally unrelatable because they are not fighting this battle against enforced sedentary behaviors. I am sure that they all watch television and sit down to edit their videos, but I seriously question how many of them are hunched over documents, spreadsheets, and emails for 8 or more hours a day on top of it. And if they’re still in their 20s, their sedentary behaviors haven’t had a chance to catch up to them yet.

So what can we do to correct this?

In one article I read, the MD-author suggested using sedentary time to break up physical activity rather than the other way around. I was surprised to read that a “Prolonged” bout of sedentary time is only 20-30 minutes of inactivity. Ideally, we would be clocking only 5-10 minutes of sedentary time at once with lots of breaks in between.

It’s also important to note that just standing up once per hour does not have a material impact on health risks associated with sedentary behavior. So how much activity DO you need to start seeing the benefits?

One study conducted on a population of individuals with chronic kidney disease found that substituting 2 minutes of sedentary activity with light-intensity activity such as walking every hour was associated with lower mortality risk in the entire study population.

The bottom line was: Even small amounts of light-intensity activity will add up week to week.

Obviously, there’s a significant range between 2 minutes of light activity every hour and the ideal of only accumulating sedentary time in bouts of 5 to 10 minutes.

Happily, I think it’s easy enough to get up and do a 2-minute lap around the house or office every hour to go to the bathroom or go refill your water.

So how could you progress from 2 minutes of movement to more like 30 minutes of movement every hour?

Moreover, how could you accomplish this during a work day?

Thinking back to last week’s episode about wearable devices, one of the downsides that I mentioned was the mental drain of constantly being distracted by reminders to check my rings and stand up.

It’s really amazing how fast the first 50 minutes of an hour go by when you’re working on something! And next thing you know, your reminder goes off and you think, didn’t I just get up and take a lap a couple of minutes ago? And you ignore the reminder until another hour has passed.

If I thought THAT level of frequency was a distraction, I can’t imagine how I would feel about being reminded to get up again after just 5 to 10 minutes of sitting at my computer.

So I decided to take the easy way out and focus on my non-working hours first. As I mentioned earlier, when I tracked my sedentary time I was really unhappy to find out that I spent the majority of my evenings and weekends being sedentary, too.

What annoyed me most about my evening sedentary time was that while my mind needed a break to zone out at the end of the day, my body didn’t. What I needed was a mindless form of physical activity that I could do while letting my minder wander off through Instagram and Netflix.

The solution seemed simple enough: A treadmill.

Not the monstrous versions you see in the cardio bay at the gym, but the small quiet ones that people started putting under their standing desks; an experiment I intend to try but need to upgrade some of my office furniture to allow for it.

After doing a few hours of research I purchased one from Amazon. The first day that I had it, I traded an hour and fifteen minutes of couch time for treadmill time while watching tv. The second day, that went up to an hour and a half. The third day, I stepped away from my desk mid-afternoon for a 15-minute walk-and-scroll session.

Not exactly reducing my bouts of sedentary time to less than 10 minutes each, but it was progress.

And I noticed some things already starting to happen after just three days.

The muscles of my glutes, hamstrings, inner thighs, and core were waking up.

I fell asleep more easily.

My posture while seated was improved; those same muscles I felt waking up while walking stayed awake while I was sitting.

My anterior pelvic tilt was easing up.

I had more mental energy and focus in the afternoon on the day I took a quick stroll after lunch.

And it had me on the lookout for more opportunities to stay in motion, either by looking forward to hopping onto the treadmill again or getting up and around doing chores, taking trash out, checking snail mail.

All of this was groundbreaking for me. I’d spent decades focused on workouts and logging time spent in exercising. And I fell for all the fitspos who claimed you could get fit in just 15 minutes a day with a fast HIIT workout. And I still love a quick circuit workout. But the missing piece that was right in front of me all along had nothing to do with my workouts; it was what I was doing with the rest of my time.

So now my focus is on how I can continue progressing to more time spent active every hour, with the ultimate goal being to stay sedentary for shorter amounts of time.