Sedantary Athletes Sitting and Weighting

Nancy Clark MS RD CSSD Mar 18, 2011


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. All too often, I listen to my clients complain, “I should be pencil thin for all the exercise I do.” Or they moan, “I eat like a bird compared to my friends...” How could this be?

The answer is many athletes burn far fewer calories than they realize; they are actually couch potatoes the majority of the day. These seemingly active people can be surprisingly sedentary, apart from their purposeful exercise.
Think about it. The majority of your waking hours can easily be spent sitting, with TV and computers being the primary culprits that induce sedentary behaviors. The average athletic person sits at 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 screen 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, speaker at the American College of Sports Medicine's Annual Meeting (Seattle, May ’09), 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 reports the more a person sits, the higher the risk of mortality. Hence, we not only need to find time to exercise, we also need to find ways to sit less—for example, bike to work, pace when talking on the phone, stand up when writing emails. (To elevate the height of your laptop computer, put it on top of a cardboard box that you put on top of your desk.) We could even reduce our carbon footprint by hanging laundry outside to dry on a clothesline. That would not only add on exercise but also save energy!
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 muscles to open the garage door, lower the car window, wash laundry, or even walk down the hall to ask a colleague a question (email is easier). For many of us, the primary movement we get in a day is our purposeful workout/training session. Hence, the goal of this article is to increase your awareness of your 24-hour activity level, and encourage you to take steps (no pun intended) to move a bit more and sit a bit less throughout the waking hours of your day.

Sitting & 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 reports just four weekly 30-minute workouts with moderate aerobic activity was enough to stimulate major health improvements (1). And isn’t it scary to think teens are already afflicted with the so-called “diseases of aging”...?

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