Get Off Your Ass (It’s Killing You).
TL;DR (Too Long; Didn’t Read)
We (humans) collectively suck at moving as we were designed to move.
A few hours a week of sport and exercise aren’t enough.
There are serious short-term and long-term consequences to this behavior.
There are an abundance of options to put more movement into your life. Find ones that work for you.
We Suck At Moving.
In the last blog (link here), we discussed why movement is crucial to us as humans, and made a case for why we need basic quality movement as an underpinning for all athletic endeavors. We briefly touched on how inactivity and a sedentary lifestyles have become modern plagues, a topic worth delving deeper into.
But not you, right? You workout! Even if you’re at the gym for an hour a day and even if your kid practices or plays for an hour a day…that’s one hour out of a twenty-four hour cycle. Are you really doing enough in that one hour to offset the damage of sitting around in the other twenty-three hours?
We all think we are better than we are, and the above paragraph probably applies to someone else right? Spend a day tracking the number of hour you spend seated. And don’t forget to track the number of consecutive hours seated. Use a fitness tracker to see how many steps you take in a given day.
We are all collectively moving less and less, and it is wreaking havoc on our bodies.
Technology is Driving Society Forward, and Physical Health Backwards
Back in the day (think way, way, way, back in the day), visiting neighboring villages required long hikes. Sourcing food necessitated carefully hunting prey. Relaxation meant interacting with others through play, dance and ritual. Movement was a natural reflex naturally occurring in response to our surroundings and needs. If we required food, we’d go kill, clean, prepare and cook dinner. If we needed to communicate with someone, we would physically go to their location and talk to them.
It is a “Netflix and Chill” World. We’re just living in it.
This reflexive way of movement has been rendered almost completely obsolete by technology.
Humans are a lazy bunch. Provide us food to eat, shelter from the elements, safety from predators and we rapidly morph into amorphous blob-like creatures doing our very best to avoid movement. Technology has aided this by making our lives infinitely more accessible and convenient; imagine a world without the accessibility of Google, Amazon or Facebook. Delivery services negate the need to source food. Instant messaging and video conferencing have eliminated many face-to-face interactions. Add-in video streaming services and everything you need is likely within 10-50 feet at any given moment.
Consider the following data that describes our movement de-evolution (Source: Active Healthy Kids):
Only 37% of Canadians (11-15 years) play outside more than 2 hours per day (outside school)
Only 35% of Canadians (5-17 years) meet the 24-hour physical activity recommendations
Only 24% of Americans (6-17 years) meet the 24-hour physical activity recommendations
Canadians (5-17 years) average between 2.3 to 4.1 hours of daily screen time, and only 33% of Americans (6-19 years) are in front of screens less than the recommended 2 hours per day
By age 16, only 5.1% of Americans are meeting the daily physical activity guidelines
What Is Normal?
Most definitely not Krishnamurti.
Almost everyone is blessed from birth with the hardware (bones, joints, muscles, tendons, ligaments) and software (brain and nervous system) needed to navigate this planet. But through the neglect of sedentary living, the problems with the hardware and software begin to accumulate. A peek inside any orthopedic surgeon’s office should be confirmation enough. The long wait times for surgery does not reflect a design flaw of the body, but a flaw in the manner that we utilize the hardware and software.
Seeing others living this lifestyle; sedentary, inactive, reliant on surgical fixes causes this behavior to slowly become assimilated as ‘normal’. But moving through life in a malnourished state of movement is not normal. The Indian philosopher Krishnamurti stated, “It’s no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.”
The human body has been relegated to the role of taxi – a vessel utilized only for ferrying the brain around – and it has become normal simply because it is measured again a dysfunctional baseline in today’s world.
Living Like a Sloth – A Global Perspective
For society, the lack of movement and physical activity paints a dire portrait of health consequences. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), insufficient physical activity is a risk factor for cardiovascular disease, cancer and diabetes, and can be linked to an estimated 3.2 million deaths globally. In China, physical activity has dropped 45% in just one generation. In fact, it is projected that today’s generation of children will have a shorter life span than their parents. That’s never happened before in our history!
A physically inactive lifestyle in a typical adolescent manifests as more school days missed, lower test scores and higher health care costs. The total direct and indirect health care costs in the United States alone is estimated at 147 billion dollars a year – twice the federal education budget. That is madness.
Living Like a Sloth – Short-Term Consequences
Deny someone food in the short term and prepare for fireworks. Physiological and psychological hunger will lead to the typically ‘hangry’ personality – irritable, impulsive and hyperactive. Basically, ‘cranky.’
Just as with food, movement is essential to our survival, and the short-term restriction of movement will cause immediate and noticeable results. An athlete with a broken ankle placed in a plaster cast will quickly demonstrate the effects of immobility - muscle wasting. Studies have shown just how quickly muscle loss can occur, sometimes up to 0.78% of total muscle volume per day! This can easily be seen as a decrease in muscle circumference and is accompanied by a decrease in bone mass, vascularization (number of capillaries) and proprioception/balance (mechanoreceptor function). These short-term effects are drastic and striking; a broken arm often needs the plaster cast reset after just a few weeks due to reductions of the underlying muscle mass and sudden bagginess or ‘looseness’ of the cast.
Living Like a Sloth – Long-Term Consequences
Human movement causes our physical structures to be loaded, and this is ultimately translated into force by our cells. Our cells interpret this data, and accordingly shape the density of bones, integrity of joints, durability of the ligaments/tendons and size of the muscles. Just imagine the thickness of a tennis player’s forearm after years of striking compared to an office worker. The human body shapes itself according to the loads placed upon it. To borrow a well-used phrase, “form follows function”.
Starving the body of multiple bout of daily mechanical stimulation over years of neglect will slowly yield the same results as short-term immobilization of a broken limb – muscle wasting, poor tendon/ligament quality, range of motion losses and decreased bone density. A failure to literally feed the body a steady diet of quality movement will result in a loss of function. The body lends itself to conservation, either use it or lose it.
Cool Story, Bro.
The moral of this story, is that you need to move more. Having your kids in sport for an hour a day isn’t going to cut it. Running on a hamster wheel or pounding the pavement for an hour a day isn’t going to cut it. It is simply not enough load to offset the damage being done by 23 hours of daily inactivity.
Try these eight suggestions to move more, stay limber, healthy and active.
Take the stairs. Ugh. Barf. You’ve heard this so many times before, and yet you likely still haven’t absorbed and assimilated this habit. Get off the subway escalator and take the stairs. Just do it.
Get off the subway or bus one stop early. Look for a parking spot further away from the door It’ll cost you 10 minutes, tops. Can’t do it because you’re in a rush? Sure you can. Just walk faster, or maybe jog to the door.
Dance. It’s one of the most primal forms of human movement, as ancient as our species. Music moves us. And it doesn’t have to be something extravagant. Throw on your favorite tune and jam away on that air guitar or cut a rug to your favorite beats. It doesn’t need to be complicated, it just needs to happen.
Recess. The prized time of everyday when kids spend time in the yard horsing around. Ensure your kids get outside, device free, and encourage them to run around, play tag, come up with games and anything other than sitting around indoors.
Watching some television? Sit on the floor. It will naturally force you to move more than sprawling out on a couch.
Get a dog. And then walk that thing for at least an hour a day.
Stand up at school, work and home. You don’t need a fancy standing desk, just a few boxes to pile your materials on.
Use a pedometer or step counter. They’re cheap and often built into phones, fitbits and smartwatches. See how many steps you actually take in a day. Don’t be surprised if it’s embarrassingly low.
And that’s it. You know how tired you feel after a day behind a desk and how rejuvenated you feel after something as simple as a brisk walk. Give it a shot. It won’t disappoint!