I WANT to set you a challenge. A no-sit challenge.
Here are the rules. No sitting on any furniture for an entire day. If that sounds too hard, try for two hours to begin with and then add another hour each time you try it. Or set yourself a time that you think you can achieve, but would prove challenging. I’ll make an exception for when you have to drive your car, but, if you want to be hard core, take public transport instead and stand. Or, better still, use a bicycle.
Sitting on the floor or in the bottom of a squat is permitted. You can also kneel on one leg or both or keep switching. But the aim of the challenge is to use your body more, not less. Use it or lose it, as they say.
Pick a day when this is most practical, like a non-working day, and report back to me with your results. Observe how it makes you feel, what you do instead of sitting and how your body responds.
So why the no-sit challenge?
I’m a sit-less advocate. As a fitness instructor, I have clients who come to see me to get into shape or fitter or stronger or all of the aforementioned. However, I know that what I prescribe in one hour is only a part of the transformation. What goes on outside of the gym is equally, if not more important and I’m not just talking about food intake.
Here’s a quote from biomechanist Katy Bowman that touches upon some of my concerns: “The social conditions that promote inactivity have been building for decades”.
From my experience, the factors that MOST undermine success from fitness training are (a) lifestyle choices (b) a lack of patience.
The following is a fairly typical chain of events for many people: wake up, SIT at a table to have breakfast. Go to work, either by SITTING in a car or SITTING on a train or bus. Arrive at work and SIT for hours at a desk. During lunch you will probably find somewhere to SIT and eat. On the way home the pattern is repeated. SIT on the train or bus or in the car. Arrive home. SIT down for dinner and then SIT on a couch or sofa and watch TV. Go to bed and lie down for between six-eight hours.
That adds up to a lot of sitting, stillness and lack of movement. Our bodies adapt to the demands – or lack of – that we place upon them. So should we be surprised when our bodies adopt the form that they do and begin to fail us? And is it realistic to believe just a few hours in the gym or exercising each week will reverse or offset that?
So my point is that we sit far too much, dramatically reducing our activity levels, while shortening and stiffening our muscles and much more that I won’t even go into here. All of which undermines the work you put in at the gym or your chosen activity and, over the long term, leads to our bodies crumbling long before they were ever supposed to.
Grab a piece of paper and do an approximate and honest calculation of the average number of hours you might spend each day sitting down.
It’s not what our bodies were designed for. We were built to move.
And, when you really think about it and look around you, you will see how everything in our culture of comfort and ease and instant gratification is designed to make us move and do less: we have lifts and elevators and moving walkways and transportation vehicles and lazy couches with remote controls so we never have to stand up. In fact, I heard the other day that Denver airport in the US doesn’t even have a set of stairs!
If each day you train or do physical activity for one hour, but spend, say, eight hours lying down asleep and, cumulatively, a further 7-10 hours seated or hunched over a desk staring at a computer, what shape will your body most likely adopt and how will this affect the way your body performs? Multiply this by weeks and years and you can see the larger problem facing humankind.
For many of us it all starts when we go to school. The average time a child will spend seated at a desk during their school life (in western society) is 15,000 hours! Think what that can do to your body and spine over time.
The challenge facing children is being addressed in some quarters with, for example, initiatives to introduce standing desks to classrooms. This is in the early stages, but the initiative has shown many benefits, including burning more calories, less body pain, improved attention, greater flexibility, increased productivity…
In California, for instance, Juliet Starrett, wife of Kelly Starrett (of CrossFit fame), started a campaign for standing desks called Standup Kids to improve the health of thousands of children. It’s now slowly spreading throughout the US. There are movements like the Chair-Free Project that are now gathering momentum as we realise the harmful of effects of too much sitting.
Ever wondered why children, especially boys, shuffle in and swing on their chairs? It’s not always because they need the toilet! It’s because they can’t get comfortable. Children at that age want to move. But with the rise of electronic devices and less outdoor play, that is going to change rapidly, which is a subject matter for another day.
Why do I allow floor-sitting in my challenge? It’s a better alternative because it permits our bodies more movement and to adopt more postures than sitting on a chair.
This challenge is to make you more aware of what sitting and lack of movement does to us – how it makes us more lazy and inactive and, eventually, broken and sick.
BUT here’s the really good and life-changing part: YOU can do something about it.