The Independent Rowing News

Imagine this: a lean, fit athlete who trains hard, eats heartily, and does not fret about getting fat. While this image holds true for some athletes, it seems far from reality for others. The truth is that many athletes burn far fewer calories than they realize and are technically couch potatoes for the majority of the day. Apart from their discrete bouts of exercise, these seemingly active people can be surprisingly sedentary.

“The average person sits 9.3 hours a day. This high amount of inactivity is bad for your health.”

Think about it. The majority of your waking hours can easily be spent seated, with TV and computers the primary sources of sedentary behavior. The average athletic person sits during breakfast, drives to work, sits all day, drives to the gym, exercises for 45 to 90 minutes, drives home, sits at dinner, and then sits in front of a TV screen computer monitor before going to bed. Even competitive athletes who do double workouts often live a sedentary lifestyle. They generally do little but rest and recover during the non-exercise parts of their day.

According to Neville Owen, a speaker at the American College of Sports Medicine’s annual meeting in May, the average person sits 9.3 hours a day. Even if you are physically fit, this high amount of inactivity is bad for your health. Exercise reduces health risks in both lean and overweight people, even if the exercise is not associated with weight loss. Owen explains that the more a person sits, the higher their risk of mortality. Hence, we not only need to find time to exercise, we also need to find ways to sit less—like biking to work, pacing when talking on the phone, or standing up when writing emails.

Because activity has been engineered out of our lives, non-exercisers and avid athletes alike can easily spend too much time doing too little activity. For example, we no longer use our bodies to open the garage door, lower the car window, wash laundry, or—thanks to email—walk down the hall to ask a colleague a question. For many of us, the primary movement we get in a day is our purposeful workout/training session. Which is why we need to be more aware of our 24-hour activity levels and take the necessary steps to move a bit more and sit a bit less throughout the waking hours of the day.

Sitting and Weighting
People who sit a lot tend to gain undesired body fat. The more they sit, the fatter they get. Fatness heightens the risk of heart disease, diabetes, and associated chronic diseases. These health risks start at a young age. A recent study with sedentary teens reported just four weekly 30-minute workouts with moderate aerobic activity was enough to stimulate major health improvements.

Both sedentary and active people of all ages commonly assume their undesired body fat will melt away effortlessly once they start exercising. This is not the case. A study with sedentary people between the ages of 56 to 78 years who added one hour of brisk walking a day showed that they did not lose undesired body fat, despite adding the hour of exercise and eating no additional food.

Why? Because they napped more and slept more as a result of the increased physical activity. In the course of 24 hours, they compensated for the extra work by conserving energy and being more sedentary at other times of the day. Endurance athletes tend to do the same thing. Many fail to acknowledge how inactive they are when they stop training. Exercise enhances fat loss if it contributes to a caloric deficit over the course of 24 hours. But all too often, athletes burn off 600 calories when training, only to refuel with 800 empty calories while watching TV.

Sitters Versus Fidgeters
Some athletes love to be sedentary. They look forward to finishing their workout, settling into their favorite comfy chair, putting their feet up, turning on the TV, and tuning out for hours on end. And yet there are those athletes who rarely sit, and when they do, they can’t sit still. They shift and wiggle in their chairs. They fidget. Their desire to do this is genetic, starts at birth, and explains why they prefer to relax by puttering (as opposed to sitting and reading)—and why they eat more than the sedentary athletes who eat like birds.

While fidgeters may have a “fast” metabolism, sedentary athletes often complain that their metabolism is “slow.” They eat small portions, yet have undesired body fat. They commonly believe something is wrong with their bodies. The truth is, they barely move their bodies over the course of a day, other than during their five-mile run or one-hour spin class. There’s nothing wrong with them from a medical standpoint.

To their detriment, sedentary athletes tend to burn fewer calories over the course of the day than they realize. Similarly, obese people tend to sit 2.5 hours more than their peers, saving them about 350 calories a day. A good fidgeter, in comparison, can burn an extra 300 to 500 calories per day. This raises a classic chicken-or-egg question: Does obesity foster sedentary behavior or does the tendency to be sedentary foster obesity? By Nancy Clark