Doing something just for the heck of it isn't gonna give you the result you ask for. This statement is now a certainty backed by the results of a Finnish study. Ask yourself, you exercise regularly but still spend long hours sitting in one place thinking that you are as healthy as you can get. Nope, research says that no matter how much you exercise, prolonged inactivity may affect your health anyway. Here's more on it.The 'Can you exercise and still be a couch potato' question motivated a group of Finnish scientist to make a further investigation into this peculiar matter. The research was conducted on a group of physically fit and healthy volunteers, who donned special shorts that measured the muscular activity of their leg and thigh muscles.
The volunteers had their own ways of exercising, some ran, a few lifted weights while some of them played soccer. A few Nordic-walked too. They were asked to work out as usual on one day and to completely abandon exercise the next day. Those special shorts measured how much they moved their legs.
To support the fact, a study published in The Archives of Internal Medicine, Australian researchers compared medical records and lifestyle questionnaires for more than 2.2mil Australian adults who were over 45.
They found that, the more hours men and women sat at the same place, the more they aggravated their risk of dying prematurely. Those people who sat for more than 8 hours a day had a 15% greater risk of dying early than those sat for less than 4 hours a day.
Unlike the Finnish study, none of the previous researches had directly studied the muscular activity of the legs of the volunteers. The Finnish researchers embedded flexible electrodes into the fabric of the shorts. These electrodes tracked the contractile activity of the quadriceps.
The volunteers also completed detailed logs of all the activities during the study. There was no difference in how much time people spent being couch potatoes on the days when they exercised compared with days when they did not.
When they formally exercised, volunteers used about 13% more energy over all than on days they didn't exercise. But they still sat 68% of the time. It seems that after exercising, the study authors concluded,
"People substitute either lighter and/or sedentary activities"
"Normal exercise which fills so few hours of even active people's days, may not be enough in terms of health"But exercise paired with otherwise unalloyed sitting should be avoided. Almost everybody should look for opportunities to reduce their sitting time and move more and often.
