3 Short Walking Breaks Can Reverse Harm From 3 Hours of Sitting

An anonymous reader writes: Medical researchers have been steadily building evidence that prolonged sitting is awful for your health. One major problem is that blood can pool in the legs of a seated person, causing arteries to start losing their ability to control the rate of blood flow. A new experimental study (abstract) has discovered it's quite easy to negate these detrimental health effects: all you need to do is take a leisurely, 5-minute walk for every hour you sit. "The researchers were able to demonstrate that during a three-hour period, the flow-mediated dilation, or the expansion of the arteries as a result of increased blood flow, of the main artery in the legs was impaired by as much as 50 percent after just one hour. The study participants who walked for five minutes for each hour of sitting saw their arterial function stay the same — it did not drop throughout the three-hour period. Thosar says it is likely that the increase in muscle activity and blood flow accounts for this."

Comments

Do you really think corporations are going to...

[Anonymous Coward]

allow us to waste about 10% of the day just walking around? Given a typical developer work day of ten hours, that's fifty minutes per day. Given the hard time we get about getting up for coffee or to go to the bathroom, that will never be acceptible in corporate America.