Sitting at your desk for ten hours isn’t great for your health. That much is clear. But if you’re wondering how much movement it actually takes to undo that damage, researchers now have a number: about 30 to 40 minutes of real, sweat-breaking activity.
The finding comes from a 2020 meta-analysis published in the British Journal of Sports Medicine, which pulled fitness tracker data from over 44,000 people across four countries. People who clocked 30 to 40 minutes of moderate to vigorous movement each day had the same risk of early death as those who spent far less time sitting in the first place.
“In active individuals doing about 30-40 minutes of moderate to vigorous intensity physical activity, the association between high sedentary time and risk of death is not significantly different from those with low amounts of sedentary time,” the researchers wrote. If you work out hard enough and long enough, you can level the playing field, even if you spend the rest of the day in a chair.
Study Reveals How Much You Need to Work Out to Make Up for Sitting All Day
This doesn’t mean you need to train like a triathlete. A brisk walk, a fast bike ride, an aggressive round of vacuuming—anything that gets your heart rate up counts. And if 40 minutes sounds like too much, start smaller. Even short bursts help.
“All physical activity counts, and any amount of it is better than none,” said Emmanuel Stamatakis, a physical activity researcher at the University of Sydney. “People can still protect their health and offset the harmful effects of physical inactivity.”
The research helped inform the World Health Organization’s 2020 global exercise guidelines, which recommend 150 to 300 minutes of moderate-intensity activity per week or 75 to 150 minutes of vigorous movement. That works out to about 30 minutes a day if you’re trying to undo your daily desk sentence.
There are still some unknowns—like the exact tipping point where sitting turns from “meh” to medically concerning. “We are still not clear, for example, where exactly the bar for ‘too much sitting’ is,” said Stamatakis. But at least now we know the general tradeoff: ten hours in a chair, give or take, costs you about 40 minutes on your feet.
So yeah, go walk it off. Hard.
The post How Much Exercise Is Needed To Offset a Day of Sitting? appeared first on VICE.
