Sit Less, Move More

Written by Kelly Dodds, MS

Most of us know we should exercise.. We come to the gym, lift weights, do cardio, and improve our fitness. But what happens during the rest of your day?

You can work out for an hour and still spend most of your waking hours sitting. This month, we're paying attention to movement that isn't a workout.

This activity is called Non-Exercise Activity Thermogenesis, or NEAT. It is the energy we expend through movement that isn't sleeping, eating, or intentional exercise. Non-exercise activity is walking through the grocery store, carrying groceries from the car, cleaning the house, yard work, taking the stairs, walking the dog, moving around at work, even fidgeting. None of these things feel like exercise, but they add up. The difference in daily movement between people can be surprisingly large.

We tend to think about physical activity as something we schedule: “I worked out today.” But our bodies don't separate the day into workout and unplanned movement. Movement counts whether you're breaking a sweat or not.

Exercise and daily movement aren't the same thing

This distinction is important.. structured exercise gives us adaptations that ordinary movement doesn't. Lifting makes us grow more muscle and get stronger, conditioning improves cardiorespiratory fitness and mitochondria function, training challenges our bodies to create adaptations.

NEAT doesn't replace that, but exercise doesn't make the rest of the day irrelevant either.

Imagine two people who do the exact same one-hour workout. One spends most of the remaining day sitting, the other walks the dog, takes the stairs, moves around at work, does chores, walks after dinner, and generally spends less time sitting. They did the same workout but they did not have the same activity level.

Ideally, we want both: Exercise to improve our physical capacity AND movement throughout the day to utilize our capacity.

How much movement do we actually need?

You've probably heard. “Get 10,000 steps per day.” It's a nice round number, but it's also not a magic number. Recent research combining data from dozens of studies found that many health benefits increased substantially as people moved from very low step counts toward roughly 5,000–7,000 steps per day. Benefits didn't suddenly appear at 10,000 steps.. 9,999 isn't a failure.

Overall, the biggest benefit may be for the people who currently move the least. If you average 3,000 steps per day, getting to 5,000 may be a much more meaningful goal than deciding 10,000 is impossible and doing nothing to increase step count.

This is a recurring theme in health: You don't have to be optimal to get better.

What about sitting?

Steps aren't the whole story.. We also have evidence that spending long periods sitting without moving isn't ideal. This gets interesting because researchers have actually brought people into laboratories, fed them standardized meals, and compared uninterrupted sitting with sitting interrupted by short periods of movement. Breaking up prolonged sitting with brief bouts of light walking improves post-meal glucose and insulin responses compared with remaining seated–and the movement doesn't have to be strenuous. Even a few minutes of light walking can make a measurable difference.

That gives us another useful strategy: Don't just exercise a few times per week, move repeatedly.

If you work at a desk, try getting up periodically.. walk to refill your water, take the stairs, walk while you're on the phone, go outside for five minutes, walk around the building, walk to the restroom, do something instead of sitting through another 60 minutes of your day. Small bouts of movement may not feel important individually, but the point is that you repeat them every day and the steps add up.

Walking after meals

One of the easiest places to add movement is after eating. Your muscles can take up glucose when they're contracting, which is one reason light activity after a meal can reduce the post-meal glucose response compared with sitting. You don't need to turn lunch into another workout, but try walking for 5–10 minutes after a meal. If you do it after lunch and dinner, you've added 10–20 minutes of movement in your schedule.

We need to out how much you currently move and possibly do a little more if needed.

Find your baseline: Track your normal steps for seven days (don't intentionally change anything yet). At the end of the week, calculate your average and that's your starting point.

If you are below 8,000 steps per day, aim to increase your daily average by approximately 2,000 steps above your baseline. For most people, that's roughly another mile of walking spread throughout the day. You don't have to do it all at once.. ten minutes here, five minutes there.. A walk after lunch, parking farther away, taking the stairs, walking the dog, cleaning the house, doing yard work, walking while you make a phone call, shopping for groceries instead of ordering pick up, etc. This is not another workout. Change how much you move during the rest of your day.

If you're already very active

Maybe you already average 10,000–15,000 steps and you don't necessarily need to chase an increasingly large number. Instead, look at how your movement is distributed. Do you train in the morning or evening, accumulate a lot of steps at that time, but then sit uninterrupted for five+ hours? Your challenge might be to break up those long periods of sitting.

Try getting up and moving for a few minutes every 60 minutes when you're otherwise sedentary.

Don't overcomplicate it

You don't need a standing desk, a walking pad, or pace around your house at 9 PM because your watch says you're 437 steps short. Just start noticing opportunities to move.

Our environment has made it incredibly easy not to move. We drive, sit at computers, order things to our doors, we take elevators, watch television, automate chores.. Not that these things are inherently bad, but collectively, they remove movements that evolutionarily happened naturally throughout the day. We can put some movement and mobility back into our modern lifestyles.

Try This challenge:

1. Measure your normal daily steps/activity for one week

2. Increase your average by about 2,000 steps per day, if necessary

3. And/Or break up long periods of sitting when you can

4. Add a 5–10 minute walk after a meal

5. Keep coming to the gym regularly.. but remember that health isn't determined only by what you do during that one hour of your day, you have to move more during the other 23, too.