Spending a lot of time sitting down isn't good for us, but how much exercise is needed to counteract the negative health effects of sitting all day?
It should take about 40 minutes a day to build up a sweat.
According to the research, up to 40 minutes of moderate to vigorous intensity physical activity every day is enough to balance out 10 hours of sitting still.
A meta-analysis study published in 2020 analyzed nine previous studies and found that a total of 44,370 people in four different countries were wearing a fitness tracker.
As time spent engaging in moderate-to-vigorous intensity physical activity decreased, the risk of death increased for those with a more sedentary lifestyle.
The researchers said that the association between high sedentary time and risk of death is not different from those with low sedentary time.
If you don't do all that sitting around, you can lower your risk of an earlier death back down to what it would be if you did all that sitting around.
The benefit of this particular piece of research is that it relied on relatively objective data from Wearables and not data self- reported by the participants.
The study was published at the same time as the World Health Organization 2020 Global Guidelines on Physical Activity and Sedentary Behaviour were released. There is a special edition of the British Journal of Sports Medicine.
According to Stamatakis, all physical activity counts and any amount of it is better than none.
The harmful effects of physical activity can be mitigated by people.
According to the 2020 WHO guidelines, 150-300 minutes of moderate intensity or 75-150 minutes of vigorous intensity physical activity is recommended every week to counter sedentary behavior.
Walking up the stairs instead of taking the lift, playing with children and pets, taking part in yoga or dancing, doing household chores, walking, and cycling are all ways in which people can be more active.
The 40-minute time frame for activity fits in with previous research, but it's difficult to make recommendations across all ages. We should learn more about how to stay healthy if we have to work long hours.
There are still some gaps in our knowledge despite the new guidelines reflecting the best available science.
We don't know where the bar for too much sitting is. We will hopefully have answers in a few years, but this is a fast- paced field of research.
The research was published in the British Journal of Sports Medicine.
The original version of this article was published in November 2020.
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