There has been increasing evidence in recent years that a sedentary lifestyle is bad for us. One of the antidotes has been to focus on the amount of exercise that we need to do daily with various goals such as 10,000 steps or 30 minutes of ‘moderate’ activity being prescribed.
However, a new study published in the Journal of Applied Physiology suggests that exercise alone doesn’t counter prolonged periods of sitting. A caveat here, this was a very small study however the authors do propose an underlying mechanism to explain their findings.
Prolonged periods of inactivity cause enzymatic changes in the muscles which impact the body’s processing of lipids and sugars. Not even a single big training session day counteracts this.
The takeout. Get up and move regularly during the day – every hour is a good start and if you can add a resistance component such as walking up stairs then even better.