Breaks From Sitting: Now we know how often and how long
We all sit far more than is good for us.1 And by now the physiology of sitting and the epidemiology of its aftermath have been pretty well worked out: We sit for more than 8 hours every day, and ...
How to Add 3,000 Steps to Your Day Without Getting Up From Your (Active) Chair
Every physician knows that exercise is the best medicine. If doctors could write a prescription for exercise every patient would get one before he left the office. Hypocrites understood this wel...
A paper recently published in the prestigious journal Nature Medicine will revolutionize our approach to exercise. Here’s the executive summary: if health is your goal, then visits to the gym aren...
Standing vs. Sitting I talk to lots of people about their office setups, but one recent conversation still haunts me. A few months ago, I was chatting with Anette, a very earnest 30-somethi...
Can Fidgeting Help You Live Longer?
The health benefits of fidgeting Likely you know someone who is a natural-born fidgeter; you may be one of these souls yourself. If so, you’re in luck: while it’s not easy to be a fidgeter ...
Can how you sit help lower your cancer risk?
We know not only that moving is good for us but also that sedentary behavior independently contributes to a host of bad health outcomes: obesity, diabetes and heart disease are the most frequently...
Are 10,000 steps too many? “Ten thousand steps” is now a well-ingrained idea that even epidemiologists embrace, but not because it’s true. Physicians have long known that walking is importan...
The Paleo Diet is Debunked, But What About Paleo Sitting?
The Paleo Diet is Debunked, But What About Paleo Sitting? The paleo diet has had a good run, but for a bad reason. The underlying idea that our modern lives don’t match our hunter-gath...
Staying Awake at Work Staying awake at work has been a problem since the beginning of work. So, it’s not surprising that an array of anti-somnolence work-arounds have been tried over the mil...
Active Sitting: Can it keep you young?
It is a personal failing of mine that I don’t monitor my phone very carefully, so I wasn’t surprised to find that I had missed another call, but this was a call I’m sorry to have missed. The messa...
Are You Sitting Too Much? Here are the symptoms of “sitting disease”
What is sitting disease? “Sitting disease” is not a specific disease recognized by doctors. Rather, it is a lay term that epidemiologists have adopted because it neatly captures the health ...
Sometime ago I introduced a statistician programmer friend, Ramiro, to active sitting, and his eyes immediately lit up. But his first sentence took me by surprise: “When I sit on this chair, my mi...
What “Big Chair” Doesn’t Want You to Know
As with many other industries, a handful of companies make almost all of the “ergonomic” office furniture in the United States. These are ancient and immense companies. Steelcase, for example, is ...
Effortless Fitness: Why there are no gyms in Japan
Japanese people embrace walking as regular exercise. As a result, few people use gyms, but experience life-long health benefits. Could active sitting provide the same benefits as regular walking?
Every year, millions of people spend money on products that claim to improve their sports game. They might buy the latest running sneakers, or gloves for golfing, or refresh their daily yoga pract...
Workplace Wellness Programs Don’t Work. Time for a Home Office Reboot?
We humans spent our first 3 million years as hunter-gatherers, and over that long period, we came to expect certain benefits: sunshine, fresh air, fresh food, and above all physical activity. And...