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Do You Sit Too Much?

Wednesday, 04 November 2015 00:10

By Matt Fitzgerald (triathlon.competitor.com)

As a triathlete, you move more than most people. But unless you also sit less than the average person, you may still have a hard time reaching your ideal weight and optimizing your overall health. If you’re like most triathletes, when you’re not swimming, cycling or running, you’re probably sitting. That may need to change—at least a little.

According to conventional wisdom, if you exercise enough, it doesn’t matter how much time you spend sitting. But recent studies suggest that excessive time spent sitting promotes weight gain and compromises overall health independently of the amount of exercise you do....

In 2010, researchers at the University of Montreal published a study that looked at changes in calorie intake, activity level and obesity rates in Canada between 1972 and 2004. They found that while people were eating slightly less and were slightly more active in 2004, the obesity rate was also 10 percent higher. The authors speculated that people got fatter despite eating less and exercising more because of a shift toward more sedentary jobs over that 22-year period—in other words, because people were sitting more.

More focused studies have provided further evidence that the negative effects of sitting on body weight and metabolism may offset the positive effects of exercise. For example, a 2009 study at Pennington Biomedical Research Center found that the more time people spent sitting daily, the greater their risk was for dying of cardiovascular disease, regardless of how much they exercised. READ MORE