Q&A: The health risks and business costs of prolonged sitting
Dr. Andrew Miners, Director of Sports Therapy and Rehabilitation at Medcan, answers our questions
This month, we chatted with Dr. Andrew Miners, Director of Sports Therapy and Rehabilitation, to discuss the negative effects of sitting too long, and how you can keep your employees moving—ultimately helping to prevent chronic disease.
1. What are the risks of sitting for too long?
Reduced physical activity or excessive sedentary behaviour, whether you’re lying down, sitting, or standing still too much will contribute to a general deterioration of your overall health, and may lead to the onset of chronic diseases such as diabetes, cardiovascular disease, stroke and certain types of cancers.
Reduced physical activity can also lead to musculoskeletal pain, neck or back pain. Repetitive sitting is like running a marathon. A marathon is the definition of repetitive strain or repetitive loading, right? You’re doing the same thing repetitively for a long period of time. Sitting is similar. Although it’s not as high loading, it’s still putting the same stress on the same tissues repetitively and in a sustained way.
2. How can sitting disease affect a workforce?
Sitting disease can affect a workforce in a number of ways. First of all, increasing sick leaves will affect your bottom line. Second, it affects the overall mentality of your workplace. If people are working through long hours in pain, or feeling generally unwell, they’re going to have less mental vitality and increased risk for mental health issues.
You may have higher turnover depending on whether your employees are dealing with chronic disease. By taking strategies to minimize or alleviate sitting disease, you will be able to improve the mental health and physical capacity of your workforce to work.
3. What can employers do to counteract sitting disease?
Simply stating to someone “don’t sit” is, quite honestly, ineffective. People have to sit to do their work. They can, however, have healthier sitting behaviours. There are some very simple strategies to alleviate or minimize the risk of developing significant, chronic or ongoing muscle and joint pains related to prolonged static activity.
In order to encourage healthier sitting behaviours, education is very important, as well as strategies to alleviate them, whether that’s encouraging regular health checkups with family physicians to simple things team leaders can do.
If you can, make your meetings mobile—and I don’t mean with a phone. I mean physically move. If you’re in a leadership position, encourage walking meetings, or meet in a stairwell so that you can walk up and down the stairs, as opposed to sitting statically discussing things. In meetings lasting longer than 40 minutes, stand up and have a stretch break.
4. What are some workplace technologies—such as ergonomic chairs and standing desks—that can help mitigate the risks?
Standing desks are good, but really it’s the change in posture that’s better. Even standing for too long could cause issues, so it’s variety that people need. Having a modifiable work station, with the option to stand and sit, is good.
A good ergonomic chair should support good posture, but it should also facilitate movement of your posture and not try to lock you in. This will enable someone to have movement over multiple joint angles.
Fitbits are good to track activity levels throughout the day, along with a variety of apps out there that can help with that. It could even be as simple as putting a reminder in your Outlook, day organizer, phone or you can simply put a sticky note on your screen that says “move.” It doesn’t always have to be a hi-tech solution.
Four tips for mitigating the risks of sitting disease
1. Avoid sitting when you don’t have to.
2. When you can’t avoid prolonged sitting, sit smarter. Change your posture often; instead of just focusing on sitting in an ergonomically correct position, try to avoid putting the same load on the same tissues for a repetitive time. Try sitting in a variety of sitting positions, what you’re doing is changing the stress and load going on your tissues.
3. Take a mini break. Sitting is a flexed posture. If you’re sitting hunched over your laptop, your ankles are bent, your knees are bent, your hips are bent, your back is bent; everything is bent. The best release for this is to do the opposite. Do some very basic extension-based movements every 40 to 50 minutes.
4. Exercise is medicine. Getting regular exercise and doing some basic preventive movements or exercises on a daily basis will help prevent certain diseases.
