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I'm Brandon Sneed. I wrote the book The Edge of Legend, I'm a journalist for GQ, ESPN The Magazine, and ESPN.com, and I edit HeyGoodCall.com. 

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Monday
May172010
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Sitting down kills

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From a Yahoo! news article I saved a couple weeks ago:

If you're reading this article sitting down -- the position we all hold more than any other, for an average of 8.9 hours a day -- stop and take stock of how your body feels. Is there an ache in your lower back? A light numbness in your rear and lower thigh? Are you feeling a little down?

These symptoms are all normal, and they're not good. They may well be caused by doing precisely what you're doing -- sitting. New research in the diverse fields of epidemiology, molecular biology, biomechanics, and physiology is converging toward a startling conclusion: Sitting is a public-health risk. And exercising doesn't offset it. "People need to understand that the qualitative mechanisms of sitting are completely different from walking or exercising," says University of Missouri microbiologist Marc Hamilton. "Sitting too much is not the same as exercising too little. They do completely different things to the body."

The rest of the article doesn't get any better. Some highlights:

Older people who move around have half the mortality rate of their peers. Frequent TV and Web surfers (sitters) have higher rates of hypertension, obesity, high blood triglycerides, low HDL cholesterol, and high blood sugar, regardless of weight. Lean people, on average, stand for two hours longer than their counterparts.

~

Much of the perception about what makes for healthy and comfortable sitting has come from the chair industry, which in the 1960s and '70s started to address widespread complaints of back pain from workers. A chief cause of the problem, companies publicized, was a lack of lumbar support. But lumbar support doesn't actually help your spine. "You cannot design your way around this problem," says Cranz. "But the idea of lumbar support has become so embedded in people's conception of comfort, not their actual experience on chairs. We are, in a sense, locked into it."

~

The best sitting alternative is perching -- a half-standing position at barstool height that keeps weight on the legs and leaves the S-curve intact. Chair alternatives include the Swopper, a hybrid stool seat and the funky, high HAG Capisco chair. Standing desks and chaise longues are good options. Ball chairs, which bounce your spine into a C-shape, are not. The biggest obstacle to healthy sitting may be ourselves. Says Jackie Maze, the vice-president for marketing at Keilhauer: "Most customers still want chairs that look like chairs."

Much amazes me about this article. One is that something like this doesn't get more publicity, more airtime, more visibility. Most of us spend most of our days in chairs, sitting. Heck, I'm sitting at my desk as I type this. And yet, this implies that sitting down as much as we do is going to kill us. And even more unbelievably, those that are aware of the problem get in their own way because we "still want chairs that look like chairs." 

Update: OK, I tried working while standing up for awhile. Not as bad as I thought. But I'm going with a new strategy: working while lying on the couch. Oh yeah. There are definitely perks to being a writer. 

Note: Why that picture? Because it's awesome. I don't care that it's not related at all.

Comment1 Comment | DateMay 17, 2010

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