• Posted November 4, 2024

Too Much Sitting Harms the Heart, Even in Folks Who Exercise

There's just something about sitting.

New research shows that too much time on sofas and chairs harms the heart -- even among people who get the minimum recommended amount of daily exercise.

“Taking a quick walk after work may not be enough" to offset the health dangers of sitting, said study lead author Chandra Reynolds. She's a professor of psychology and neuroscience at the University of Colorado in Boulder.

Her team published its findings recently in the journal PLOS One.

The data comes from an ongoing study of over a thousand former or current Coloradans, 730 of who are twins. Reynolds' team focused on participants aged 28 to 49.

Study lead author Ryan Bruellman said the cohort was relatively young, because "young adults tend to think they are impervious to the impacts of aging. But what you do during this critical time of life matters.”

Bruellman is now a PhD candidate at the University of California, Riverside.

A lot of the participants were sitting a lot of the time: An average of almost nine hours per day, according to the study.

Exercise rates ranged from 80 and 160 minutes of moderate physical activity per week and less than 135 minutes of vigorous exercise weekly. 

The Boulder team then assessed each person's "heart age" using two key heart health indicators: total cholesterol/high-density lipoprotein and body mass index (BMI).

The result: As sitting time increased, heart aging did, too.

Even when folks met minimum daily exercise recommendations -- about 20 minutes per day of "moderate" exercise -- the deleterious effect to the heart of all that sitting didn't budge.

Adding in "vigorous" exercise (for example, running or cycling) for about 30 or more minutes per day did seem to help counteract the harms from sitting, however. But it still didn't bring those harms back to zero.

According to a news release from the university, data from the twins in the study suggests that "replacing sitting with exercise seemed to work better to improve cholesterol than simply adding exercise to a full day of sitting."

The researchers' suggestions for folks who sit a lot: Try using a standing desk at work, get in at least 30 minutes of vigorous exercise per day or add in strenuous workouts on your days off as a "weekend warrior."

More information

Find out more about the health dangers of sitting at Johns Hopkins University.

SOURCE: University of Colorado Boulder, news release, Nov. 1, 2024