More Sobering Crap About Sitting

We all keep seeing reports about the dangers of sitting (and clearly, I can't stop blogging about it), but everyone keeps their butt cheeks glued to the couch anyway. According to this new article in the New York Times, most of us spend "50 to 70 percent" of our lives sitting -- mostly at work or in front of our television sets.

Is TV really that good? Perhaps. I, for one, have spent many an hour planted in front of the boob tube, gazing slack-jawed at the glowing images on the screen. But check this out:

Every single hour of television watched after the age of 25 reduces the viewer’s life expectancy by 21.8 minutes. By comparison, smoking a single cigarette reduces life expectancy by about 11 minutes, the authors [of an Australian research study] said. 

Looking more broadly, they concluded that an adult who spends an average of six hours a day watching TV over the course of a lifetime can expect to live 4.8 years fewer than a person who does not watch TV.

Those results hold true, the authors point out, even for people who exercise regularly. It appears, Dr. Veerman says, that “a person who does a lot of exercise but watches six hours of TV” every night “might have a similar mortality risk as someone who does not exercise and watches no TV.”

Guess I'll have to catch up on episodes of The Walking Dead while standing up.

Link Dump

I've been laying low this week.

It's not by choice. The house is still wrecked, which means we're well into the second month of living in a hotel. Which means the grandparents don't have room to crash overnight when Michelle's working. Which means I have no babysitters at 5 a.m. Which means no gym. Which means I'm cranky and restless.

Maybe it's a good thing that I'm forced into taking a few days off. My right shoulder has been bothering me for over a week now, and I might as well give it some extra time to recover.

Plus, I've been slammed with work, kid stuff, and the Nom Nom Paleo iPad App. (Yes, still. We're feverishly working on a new update to fix the update that was supposed to fix the previous update, but didn't. Got that?) So getting a few extra hours of sleep is a good thing. 

I'm hitting the sack, but if you're looking for something to read, check out these links:

• The New York Times wrote up a nice piece about CrossFit and Memorial Day Murph.

• "The Paleo Diet Moves From The Gym To The Doctor's Office" (NPR)

• Our friend Stacy Toth from Paleo Parents is the "Face of Paleo" in Women's World!

• Holy crap. Tickets for this year's CrossFit Games are sold out. The Home Depot Center is at capacity. I fully expect that it'll be a bazillion times crazier than last year. (And it was already pretty insane last year.) To whet your appetite for the competition, check out the Regional summary videos here.

• The Wirecutter recently researched and wrote a lengthy piece on the best standing desks. Check it out, because your office chair is killing you.

• Last but not least: Glazed-donut-flavored vodka exists. Be afraid.

Stand in the Place Where You Work (Part Deux)

Earlier this month, I posted (again) about the importance of throwing out your office chair, and put up some snapshots of how a few of my buddies from CrossFit Palo Alto have configured their workstations in order to stay off their butts during the day.

In that post, I also invited readers to submit photos of their own. I half-expected to only get a picture or two of specially-manufactured standing desks, but was happy to see that many of the folks who sent in photos had jerry-rigged their own set-ups. We stand-up types are thrifty AND creative.

Want examples? I got plenty -- after the jump...

Stand in the Place Where You Work

You really need to get rid of your office chair.

I don't know how many times I've written about this subject, but I'm sure it's gotta be at least three times, including here, here, and here. Recently, the New York Times Magazine published a long piece on the perils of staying planted on your butt all day. And if that weren't enough to get you on your feet, this infographic made the rounds last month, too:

This stuff's important, yo.

I've been using a standing desk at work for a little over a year. Rather than waiting for my employer to provide an adjustable-height desk (which would've required an ergonomic assessment first), I bought thirty bucks worth of stuff at IKEA and Home Depot and cobbled together a little platform to elevate my keyboard and monitor.

Here's my set-up:

Plenty of other CrossFit Palo Alto members have standing desks, too.

This one belongs to the Terminator:

Don't let the family photo fool you; he's still a relentless cyborg killer from the future.

The Terminator and me aren't the only 5 a.m. nutjobs with a standing desk. J-Ho's looks like this:

He works with the Terminator -- hence the similar style of standing desks. But J-Ho rocks TWO computer monitors simultaneously AND a CrossFit-style whiteboard. Take that, robot!

Blake's spending the summer in SoCal, but even though his office is temporary, he's already put together his own makeshift standing desk:

Clearly, it ain't hard to ditch your chair in favor of a standing desk. You can MacGyver one together pretty easily. Looks like Blake used letter trays, but you could just as easily use a stack of phone books, a cardboard box or a milk crate.

Anyone else got photos of standing desks to share? Send 'em to me by the end of the month and I'll post them up. (Yes, I'm blatantly ripping off John Durant's Upright Citizen feature, only I'm putting a whole lot less effort into it.)

Plus, if I manage to get my shit together, I'll even randomly select one of you for a prize of some kind. Maybe a shirt? Still working on a design for a "FITBOMB" tee so that I can wear it around the house and bask in my own glory, but it'll probably look something like this:

What do you say? Get a standing desk already!

Life Lessons from the New York Times Magazine

Planning to do some reading? This weekend's New York Times Magazine is jam-packed with healthy goodness.

The cover article by Gary Taubes (you know -- the author of "Good Calories, Bad Calories" and "Why We Get Fat") is about the eeeevils of sugar and high fructose corn syrup, which we discussed a couple of days ago.

But wait -- there’s much, much more crammed into this little issue! For example:

Mark Bittman shows you how to make lamb -- and how to carve it in three cuts!

James Vlahos spells out exactly why you need to ditch your office chair!

Sitting, it would seem, is an independent pathology. Being sedentary for nine hours a day at the office is bad for your health whether you go home and watch television afterward or hit the gym. It is bad whether you are morbidly obese or marathon-runner thin. “Excessive sitting,” Dr. Levine says, “is a lethal activity.” 

Maggie Jones examines why we need to get more sleep!

Not surprisingly, those who had eight hours of sleep hardly had any attention lapses and no cognitive declines over the 14 days of the study. What was interesting was that those in the four- and six-hour groups had P.V.T. [psychomotor vigilance task] results that declined steadily with almost each passing day. Though the four-hour subjects performed far worse, the six-hour group also consistently fell off-task. By the sixth day, 25 percent of the six-hour group was falling asleep at the computer. And at the end of the study, they were lapsing fives times as much as they did the first day...

Americans average 6.9 hours on weeknights, according to the National Sleep Foundation. Which means that, whether we like it or not, we are not thinking as clearly as we could be.

And Gretchen Reynolds surveys a bunch of talking heads in order to find the BEST EXERCISE EVER.

Other than Taubes' piece, this article was the one that piqued my interest. According to the exercise physiologists interviewed, three movements -- all of which are familiar to any CrossFit enthusiast -- stand head and shoulders above the rest:

Burpees (a.k.a., the King of all Exercises):

Ask a dozen physiologists which exercise is best, and you’ll get a dozen wildly divergent replies. “Trying to choose” a single best exercise is “like trying to condense the entire field” of exercise science, said Martin Gibala, the chairman of the department of kinesiology at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario.

But when pressed, he suggested one of the foundations of old-fashioned calisthenics: the burpee, in which you drop to the ground, kick your feet out behind you, pull your feet back in and leap up as high as you can. “It builds muscles. It builds endurance.” He paused. “But it’s hard to imagine most people enjoying” an all-burpees program, “or sticking with it for long.”

Squats:

“I nominate the squat,” said Stuart Phillips, Ph.D., a professor of kinesiology at McMaster University and an expert on the effects of resistance training on the human body. The squat “activates the body’s biggest muscles, those in the buttocks, back and legs.”

...The squat, and weight training in general, are particularly good at combating sarcopenia, he said, or the inevitable and debilitating loss of muscle mass that accompanies advancing age. “Each of us is experiencing sarcopenia right this minute,” he said. “We just don’t realize it.” Endurance exercise, he added, unlike resistance training, does little to slow the condition... Most physiologists believe that only endurance-exercise training can raise someone’s VO2max. But in small experiments, he said, weight training, by itself, effectively increased cardiovascular fitness.

“I used to run marathons,” he said. Now he mostly weight-trains, “and I’m in better shape.”

Intervals:

High-intensity interval training, or H.I.T. as it’s familiarly known among physiologists, is essentially all-interval exercise. As studied in Gibala’s lab, it involves grunting through a series of short, strenuous intervals on specialized stationary bicycles, known as Wingate ergometers. In his first experiments, riders completed 30 seconds of cycling at the highest intensity the riders could stand. After resting for four minutes, the volunteers repeated the interval several times, for a total of two to three minutes of extremely intense exercise. After two weeks, the H.I.T. riders, with less than 20 minutes of hard effort behind them, had increased their aerobic capacity as much as riders who had pedaled leisurely for more than 10 hours...

The only glaring inadequacy of H.I.T. is that it builds muscular strength less effectively than, say, the squat. But even that can be partially remedied, Gibala said: “Sprinting up stairs is a power workout and interval session simultaneously.”Meaning that running up steps just might be the single best exercise of all.

(What's your poison? Burpees, squats or intervals? Something else entirely?)

So what have we learned from just one issue of the New York Times Magazine?

• Meat is tasty, but skip dessert. 
• Sleep a lot. 
• But when you’re up, don’t sit: Do burpees instead.

Sounds like a plan.

Don't Sit Down

Once more, with feeling: Sitting is bad for you -- even if you exercise.

Men who spent more than 23 hours a week watching TV and sitting in their cars (as passengers or as drivers) had a 64 percent greater chance of dying from heart disease than those who sat for 11 hours a week or less. What was unexpected was that many of the men who sat long hours and developed heart problems also exercised. Quite a few of them said they did so regularly and led active lifestyles. The men worked out, then sat in cars and in front of televisions for hours, and their risk of heart disease soared, despite the exercise. Their workouts did not counteract the ill effects of sitting.

Get yourself a standing desk, pronto.

(Source: Kottke)

[Previously: Your Office Chair is Killing You]

Never Get Up Again

Remember how I mentioned that we all need to throw away our office chairs? It looks like Honda's taking the opposite tack; it's made it possible to never, ever stand up at work. Ever.



(Source: Neatorama)

Stand Up

I don't typically take health cues from ex-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, but as noted previously (here and here), we all need to get rid of our office chairs:

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.

The chair you're sitting in now is likely contributing to the problem. "Short of sitting on a spike, you can't do much worse than a standard office chair," says Galen Cranz, a professor at the University of California at Berkeley. She explains that the spine wasn't meant to stay for long periods in a seated position. Generally speaking, the slight S shape of the spine serves us well. "If you think about a heavy weight on a C or S, which is going to collapse more easily? The C," she says. But when you sit, the lower lumbar curve collapses, turning the spine's natural S-shape into a C, hampering the abdominal and back musculature that support the body. The body is left to slouch, and the lateral and oblique muscles grow weak and unable to support it.

This, in turn, causes problems with other parts of the body. "When you're standing, you're bearing weight through the hips, knees, and ankles," says Dr. Andrew C, Hecht, co-chief of spinal surgery at Mount Sinai Medical Center. "When you're sitting, you're bearing all that weight through the pelvis and spine, and it puts the highest pressure on your back discs. Looking at MRIs, even sitting with perfect posture causes serious pressure on your back."

Hypocritically, I'm writing this while seated.

(Source: BusinessWeek)

[Related: Don't Sit Down]