The Problem with Sitting & 1 Quick Solution

If you’re in my classes, you’ve heard me talk about how we humans are designed to move, not sit for hours on end.

Dr. James Levine, director of the Mayo Clinic-Arizona State University Obesity Solutions Initiative and inventor of the treadmill desk, is credited with coining the phrase “sitting is the new smoking.” Just Google the phrase and you’ll find a slew of recent articles invoking it. This Huffington Post blog sums up Dr. Levine’s findings nicely.

Check out the cool TED animation below making the same point. Murat Dalkilinç gives the lesson: the animation’s by Oxbow Creative.

What the video doesn’t mention: most chairs are designed to tilt us behind our sit bones. Check your own: is it pulling you back into a slump? Or encouraging you to sit erect? Is your pelvis free to tilt in any direction?

What can you do, if you have a desk job? One simple solution: set an alarm for every 30 min. or so. When it rings, stand up for a moment. Shift your weight from side to side, back to front. Compare how you feel when you come back to sitting: perhaps more alert?

1 thought on “The Problem with Sitting & 1 Quick Solution

  1. Ishak

    A person moves as one, not sarepate parts

    THE ONE MOVEMENT CONCEPT:I had a student in the 911 trauma area.. she had been a ballet dancer but had had some injuries. At one of the several 911 Volunteer Centers in which I worked (from 2001 until 2007) as an Feldenkrais practitioner, I used to teach an hour Group Feldenkrais Movement (Awareness Through Movement..ATM) Class from 5 pm until 6 pm, on Tuesdays.

    From 6 pm until 9 pm I performed Private half-hour Functional Integration (FI) sessions, These are hands on sessions to explore the complexities of certain Feldenkrais lessons, and to render the complex simpler and easier, as nature had intended.As it happened , the young ballet dancer had signed up for the first Functional Integration (FI) session one eveninhg. We had just done an s0-called complex Feldenkrais Group ATM Lesson. During this private FI session I decided to have the ballet dancer try an difficult central movement section of the previous Group ATM class’. At first you wouldn’t believe the clumsy attempts she made. But I told her to slow down her movements, and to use less effort. I kept repeating that the movement was one movement, not a series of confused fits and starts, first this limb and then that limb and then the other one. When the movement came it would be One Movement. So she slowed down and slowly used little to no effort. {Most students say that when the movement comes it were as if they weren’t moving at all , or as if the movement were d0ing its’ self .}

    Suddenly the dancer accomplished the movement. It was amazing. Suddenly, easily, the movement opened in her like a flower, as if into infinity. All her limbs and parts were moving together, not one and then the other, but together. When it comes it is one movement. It might be noted that at that moment, in that leap, so to speak, her dancer’s skills came into play. Which is another thing Feldenkrais does: It improves, and brings to fruition the other’ skills in which you are, or ever had been, engaged, and loved.

    I had thought I had discovered this One Movement business all by myself, by keen imperical study and observation and I had, it were true, but I found later, though joyously, that Feldenkrais had gotten there before me and had himself written eloquently of the one movement concept.{See AY # 241: Getting to know the hip joints.}
    –John QuinnGCFP

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