Too Much Sitting May Erase Benefits Of Exercise

It’s great that you have time to get to the gym. Unfortunately, you don’t stay at the gym: you go home, or to work, where you sit, and sit, and sit. And that sitting, researchers at Northwestern and UCLA have found, can undo much of the benefit of what you did at the gym, at least for women. HealthDay reports that the researchers found that most women who exercise regularly spend as much time sitting down as those who don’t get much exercise, and because they do, they may be susceptible to a greater risk of diabetes, cardiovascular disease, obesity and premature death. The researchers set out to learn whether people who exceed the government’s Physical Activity Guidelines for Americans — at least 150 minutes of moderate physical activity a week — are in general less sedentary than are those who don’t meet the guidelines. They rigged up 91 healthy women between 40 and 75 years old with activity monitors designed to capture periods of sitting, standing and walking, and bouts of moderate and vigorous activity, over seven days. The bad news? While the researchers found that the participants spent a virtuous 146 minutes in moderate or vigorous activity a week, they still spent the majority of their waking hours (63 percent) sitting. Time involved in exercise took up only about two percent of their day. No, you just can’t win. Read more from HealthDay.