Cultural Conditioning: Mobile vs. Sendentary Lifestyle

[Explor­ing Life] The body is designed to be in motion. In Take a break, it could save your life Jeremy Lau­rance reports that remain­ing sta­tion­ary for long peri­ods of time as a habit­ual lifestyle char­ac­ter­is­tic will threaten the health of the body. One of the pri­mary prob­lems of our mod­ern lifestyle is a ten­dency toward inac­tiv­ity in our work and leisure activ­i­ties. That is, we tend to do things that involve as lit­tle motion, and there­fore phys­i­cal effort, as pos­si­ble. While exer­cise may relieve some of the prob­lems asso­ci­ated with per­sis­tent inac­tiv­ity, it unfor­tu­nately does not solve them.

Office work­ers beware: long peri­ods of sit­ting at your desk may be a killer. Sci­en­tists have iden­ti­fied a new threat from our seden­tary lifestyles that they call “mus­cu­lar inactivity”.

Sit­ting still for long peri­ods of time leads to the build up of sub­stances in the blood that are harm­ful to health. And exer­cise alone won’t shift them.

Researchers have coined the term mus­cu­lar inac­tiv­ity as a con­di­tion that is con­nected to an increased risk of var­i­ous diseases:

Writ­ing in the British Jour­nal of Sports Med­i­cine, Elin Ekblom-Bak and col­leagues from the Swedish School of Sport and Health Sci­ences and the Karolin­ska Insti­tute in Stock­holm say research shows long peri­ods sit­ting and lack of “whole body mus­cu­lar move­ment” are strongly asso­ci­ated with obe­sity heart dis­ease, can­cer and dia­betes, and an over­all higher risk of death, irre­spec­tive of whether they take mod­er­ate or vig­or­ous exercise.

Reg­u­lar exer­cise is not enough; we must embrace reg­u­lar mov­ing. The body was designed to be in motion, and apart from focused activ­i­ties such as relax­ation or med­i­ta­tion, the body should remain in con­stant motion.

I enhance sit­ting by using the back vital­izer, a prod­uct that induces motion while sit­ting. While it is not a replace­ment for full body motion such as walk­ing, it does cre­ate a sense of motion and engage core mus­cles while sit­ting that would oth­er­wise not be present.

Another solu­tion includes a walk­ing or tread­mill work­sta­tion (see: Researcher sees future where peo­ple walk at work; Sci­en­tists Eval­u­ate Walk­ing Work­sta­tion For Obese Office Work­ers), which allows the office worker to walk while work­ing as a means to keep the body in motion. Now an office worker can lit­er­ally as well as metaphor­i­cally be on the treadmill.

Learn­ing Per­spec­tive: The learn­ing process here is what I would refer to as the re-discovery of a glar­ingly obvi­ous real­ity. The more diplo­matic term would be retrieval of a past idea. The notion that mus­cu­lar inac­tiv­ity would lead toward var­i­ous kinds of degen­er­a­tive prob­lems in the body is merely com­mon sense that doesn’t really require sci­en­tific val­i­da­tion. By inten­tion­ally or unin­ten­tion­ally cre­at­ing a soci­ety in which mil­lions of peo­ple are largely immo­bile dur­ing work can only be a col­lec­tive fail­ure to embrace com­mon sense. The fact that we need to remind our­selves to move indi­cates the depth of our own delu­sions. A mis­di­rec­tion of learn­ing often occurs when core prin­ci­ples and pre­sup­po­si­tions are for­got­ten. This arti­cle is a reminder of the impor­tance of know­ing what are basic pre­sup­po­si­tions of life and liv­ing are in order to cul­ti­vate higher lev­els of learning.