How To: Minimize Unhealthy Effects Of Sitting Too Much [Chart]

We all know that sitting too much is bad for our bodies, but the question is, do you know how bad? If you are a geek like me, you probably don’t even really want to know. Even typing this article is making me feel icky because finding out that what you love doing most (in my case, being on my computer) is unhealthy is not exactly the kind of thing you like reading or writing about. However, if you think about it, deep down beyond all those layers of geekdom, gaming, blogging and social media, we realize that we do want to live a long life, right? So I suppose it’s important to face some health issues that typically go along with a geek’s lifestyle, and that includes sitting too much.

Richard and I have both touched on this topic before. I wrote an article called The Impact New Technologies Will Have On Human Evolution, and in it there is a very creepy, disturbing picture of what sitting too much could potentially do to the human body as it evolves. There are some very bizarre things in there like an enlarged skull, the loss of our 5th toe and longer thumbs. Nothing will make you want to get up out of that chair and exercise like that gross looking picture of what we technology fanatics could evolve into.

When Richard wrote about it, it was in an article called Sitting Down Is Killing You. It was an infographic jam packed with facts about why we should really monitor how much time we sit still during the day. Not only can sitting too much cause a bunch of small health problems, it also increases the risk of death by up to 40%. 40%!!! That doesn’t sound good. USA Today also came out with an article that said sitting too much is linked to breast cancer and colon cancer. WSJ published an article about it too. It said the dangerous health effects caused by sitting too much can’t even be counteracted with a one-hour a day workout. Since the average person sits over 9 hours a day, it takes more than a one-hour workout to delete that stress on our bodies.

So what are we supposed to do? Stop sitting? That ain’t gonna happen. We could do what Joe at Book of Joe does…He has his computer attached to his treadmill. He keeps it on the lowest speed and slowly walks all day long as he blogs and does everything he needs to do on the computer. I’m no expert on this of course, but I betcha a computer geek could add ten or fifteen years to his or her life by doing that. Hmm…

One thing is for sure, we’ve got to find ways to minimize our sitting so we aren’t sitting too much during the day. This infographic by Yumi Sakugawa at WonderHowTo entitled How To Minimize Sitting Time During Your Day will give us some creative ideas for how we can stay on our feet longer. I like this chart because these are very simple ideas that wouldn’t require a huge change in lifestyle. These ideas wouldn’t ask us to make a major change like something I read recently that said we should walk 10,000 steps a day (which would be a great goal to work up to). These are just small subtle things which could really make a big difference in our lives.