GET UP: Why you should exercise for an hour if you sit for eight

You can exercise yourself out of an early grave if you sit behind a desk all day — but you’ll have to break a sweat for an hour or more. That’s every single day.

We all know that sitting for eight hours — like many of us do at work at least five times a week — has been linked to a shorter life span and a higher risk of heart disease and Type 2 diabetes, as well as breast, colon and colorectal cancers. So researchers studied data from more than 1 million men and women to determine if physical activity could reduce or even eliminate the 5 million deaths across the globe each year caused by physical inactivity.

They revealed in a Lancet report

this week that we can offset a full day spent sitting with one hour of brisk walking, cycling or some other cardio activity. Phew!

“Our message is a positive one: it is possible to reduce — or even eliminate — these risks if we are active enough, even without having to take up sports or go to the gym,” wrote lead author Professor Ulf Ekelund of the University of Cambridge.

But an hour of exercise a day is a much greater time commitment than the 150 minutes of physical activity per week that the World Health Organization currently recommends, which breaks out into just 21 minutes per day.

Fortunately, you can break that 60 minutes up into shorter sweat sessions to avoid death by desk. Dr. Ekelund recommends squeezing in a run in the morning, taking a walk during your lunchbreak and cycling to or from the office to fit in fitness.

“We did not directly analyze the data this way, but all available evidence suggests that the one hour can be done in shorter bouts,” Dr. Ekelund told the Daily News. “My personal opinion is that every single minute of activity counts."

 

But beware of Netflix and kill. The analysts also looked into time spent watching TV per day, and found everyone who spent more than three hours staring at the screen saw a higher risk of premature death. Only the most active people — the diehards who exercise between 60 and 75 minutes every day — escaped binge-watching into an early grave.

In fact, the increased mortality risk associated with sitting while watching TV for many hours a day was slightly greater than the increased risk associated with total sitting time. The authors suggest this could be because TV-watching is a marker of a more unhealthy lifestyle overall, such as skipping exercise and snacking while binging all eight episodes of “Stranger Things.”