If the headline read "people with advanced cellular age exercise less" no one would read it, but it's a more plausible interpretation of the data.
I sit ~10 hours daily, including 2+ hours driving. I'm naturally skinny but haven't done much physical exercises in recent years ("busy"). Now, at age of 34, I'm starting to realize that my body won't last forever and finally started to exercise few times per week, after I found motivating enough guide¹. It amazing how much more energized it makes you feel.<p>[1] <a href="https://www.julian.com/learn/muscle/intro" rel="nofollow">https://www.julian.com/learn/muscle/intro</a>
For almost a year I spent practically all day sitting in front of a PC monitor (used to work at home), with no exercise.<p>Then I developed pain in both knees, worse on the left knee. I figured that it was because of too much sitting, so I got a standing desk. In about a month, knee pains gone, completely.<p>Never even bothered to go see a doctor.<p>After standing for too long, I started having pains in my lower back. Solution? I got a bar stool, so I now alternate between standing and sitting.<p>What I learnt is that our body's joints (knee, elbow, waist, ankle, etc) were not designed to remain in one position for too long. Movement lubricates them.
My view might be classified as 'odd', but this is how I look at this problem, and this is what I ended up doing:<p>I do not mind living a decade shorter than those ones who are more active than me.<p>I have tried to be active, but could not fit it into my mentality. Note that I did not say my lifestyle, I said my mentality. I am unable to be active. I was not an active person a a kid, and I am not one as an adult.<p>If I aggregate all those activity hours together with all the stress about being more active (including following the effectiveness of standing desk news), it could maybe worth a couple of years of my life. I subtracted those years from that one decade, and decided that I am ok with not having that part of my life.<p>I continue programming 14 hours a day in the sitting style.
Telomere length as presently measured in white blood cells is a measure of immune health before all other factors: how often are new cells turning up with long telomeres (thus how well is the thymus and bone marrow stem cell population doing), how often are existing cells dividing and shortening their telomeres while doing it (how much stress is the immune system under, how much war is it waging), how many senescent cells are hanging around lowering the average, that sort of thing.<p>Exercise is very well associated with better immune function. So not a surprising result beyond the fact that they actually managed to get a result at all, as telomere length measured this way is actually a pretty terrible metric of aging. The correlations with aging only show up in large populations, and even there you'll find as many failures to identify associations as successes in the literature. For an individual knowing your immune cell telomere length won't tell you a great deal that you don't already know, and nor will changes over time. The numbers will be all over the map, and won't compare usefully at all with other individuals in your circumstances, unless you have a few thousand of them to compare with.<p>If you want a decent biomarker that might actually prove to be actionable, DNA methylation patterns after the model pioneered by Horvath et al look fairly promising. (There's even a Florida company offering an implementation as a service these days).<p>The sitting question is generating a lot of ink in the research community. All sorts of large epidemiological studies have tackled the topic. I think it remains unsettled as to whether it is the sitting or whether it is the inactivity: decent arguments from data could be made either way. If pulling in data from the broader context, however, the inactivity looks more compelling. Accelerometer studies are becoming more common since the miniaturization and cost reduction that came with cell phones, and these are showing that even very low levels of exercise appear to make noticeable differences to outcomes in later life - at the level of housework and puttering around the garden.
I am fairly young, 22, mostly sitting in front of the computer, even sitting while studying. So it could be said I sit around 10 hours per day.<p>When I was younger, up until the end of high school, I used to do sports, but since I got to college, I simply stopped caring. My body is skinny, really skinny, I weight 61kg, and I had that weight for last 7 years. But one day I thought maybe I should do something, not for the looks, but for the feel of my body, and physical body exhaustion just feels healthy sometimes.<p>So I thought running might be what I am looking for. Any advice on that? I am sure someone is doing it so (with lower body weight), any advice or thought on that? Btw when it's not winter, I skate, especially in summer, I use to skate all night, for 5-6 hours.
Here is something most people can do that will have great impact on your overall health: take a walking break at work. Besides the health benefits it will help you clear your head and possibly find a solution to that problem, get some sun, chat with a co-worker about life, etc....
What's the best exercise just to stay healthy? And what frequency? I would hate to exercise for years just to find out it actually harmed my health.
I work on personal projects, read HN, or do other things on my computer while I'm at home. I'm sitting at a desk and using my computer for 12+ hours a day. I rarely ever exercise, or even move my body much besides my fingers.<p>This is really terrible news for people like me.
I switched to a standup desk 5 years ago. I got a dog 3 years ago. I don't sit anymore and she forces me to take her for two walks almost everyday.<p>I don't exactly have more energy and I don't feel like I'm going to live forever, but I have noticed I am aging slightly slower than my colleagues who are forced to sit down in their offices for over 12 hours a day.
The ROI:<p>Spending time with mindless exercise: 1/48 part of a year times 70 years is 1.46 years.<p>If true that's around 8 more years in return for every 1.5 you put in. Nice ROI. :-)
This seems like one of the things that VR/AR might fix. Speaking as someone who tried VR for the first time at the mall yesterday (HTC Vive).<p>Reminds me of Bret Victor's Seeing Spaces <a href="http://worrydream.com/SeeingSpaces/" rel="nofollow">http://worrydream.com/SeeingSpaces/</a>.
These reports have an empiricist slant to them and there's usually no attempt to explain the result. No doubt there's truth to be found here, but note that mere act of sitting cannot be bad for health, otherwise seated meditation would be bad for health too (which it isn't).<p>I conjecture it is the combination of sitting and hard focus on work or video games which is relevant. The brain withdraws attention from the body (which, being supported, isn't required much beyond breathing and digestion). The result seems to be bad things like inflammation, poor lymph circulation, etc, though I think this isn't understood. I remember it was said that, a few decades back in the UK, bus drivers (seated) had more heart attacks than bus conductors (standing).
It could also very well be that those participants in the study who didn't "exercise" were lonely, were more or less alone or single, had no one to go take a walk with, have lost their closest relatives, have lost their significant other, etc. All those could factor in as much if not more than the "exercise". (and hence spend much more time indoors, probably watching the telly, and then things go from bad to worse in old age as health problems cascade)<p>And I quote "exercise" because it's not clear from the article if it's something like gymnastics, or the participant reported 30 min of daily walking and other activities like cycling. Point being, you could be unhappy and exercise a little bit every day and still be worse off than someone who's happy and loves to sit and watch the bird sings. Who knows.<p>I'd wager these days the quality of our food, and the bonds we have with people around us is far more incidental on our lifespan.<p>Here I am thinking of the less explored perspective:<p><a href="https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/oct/14/age-of-loneliness-killing-us" rel="nofollow">https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/oct/14/age-of...</a><p>Quoting<p>> "One of the tragic outcomes of loneliness is that people turn to their televisions for consolation: two-fifths of older people report that the one-eyed god is their principal company."
Especially now that prolong sitting are stressful on obile or laptop devices often times with uncontrolled radiation coupled with the fact that backache is very likely sequel because of the big weight on it & imagine how many joints are strained in this very common yet vulnerable posture & unwisely used without exercise even within the attic or office!
It's precociously an aging grind we must all review our sitting routines & punctuate it with indoor workouts or simply move briskly within a small space
I'm in this category too though I can be bold to move out JUST TO STROLL half 1km away from my attic that doubles as my lodging after a bungalow opportunity with big lawn & manho tree eloped to someone else!
Gbemisoye TIJANI
Healthnewsworker ,life & health coach
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ALLIanceglobal dis,
So they found that the group which sat for 10 hours but did 30 mins of exercise had cells just as robust as the group which ... what, sat around for 2 hours?<p>Where are the details?<p>Don't be fooled. Other studies showed that exercise doesn't negate the damage done by sitting:<p><a href="https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.cnn.com/cnn/2015/01/21/health/sitting-will-kill-you/index.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.cnn.com/cnn/2015/01/21/heal...</a><p><a href="http://www.mayoclinic.org/healthy-lifestyle/adult-health/expert-answers/sitting/faq-20058005" rel="nofollow">http://www.mayoclinic.org/healthy-lifestyle/adult-health/exp...</a><p>Get off your butt, especially if you work on a computer. Take breaks to alternate between mental and physical activity.
Anecdote:
I used to work from home and pretty much sat down the whole day. I would still go for a run once or twice a week, but I would quickly experience a sharp pain in my lower back that made it really hard to run. Some Googling led me to believe that my tight hip flexors might be causing my back pain, and that sitting down all day could lead to tight hip flexors. I've since started working for a couple of hours per day at a ghetto standing desk and my back pains are pretty much gone.<p>Another thing that I really highly recommend is Joe DeFranco's stetching programme, Limber 11 (<a href="https://youtu.be/FSSDLDhbacc" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/FSSDLDhbacc</a>). You can do the whole thing in about 10 minutes, and it leaves your whole body feeling nice and relaxed.
So, telomere length as a measure of aging is something that keeps popping up from my lay-person perspective. It <i>seems</i> important to know about, and I have little awareness of my lack of awareness, so, those of you who live and breathe telomere research.. could shed some light on my ignorance?<p>- what "big-picture" information governs the "big-picture" processes?<p>- critical details swept under the rug with my un-nuanced understanding of the hypothesis, (e.g. "telomeres do not shorten uniformly/monotonically/predictably")?<p>- how does empirical research concerning telomeres compare to the state (or even future) of our understanding/control of aging?
My solution to this is to set myself weekly goals in terms of steps. It changes your routine when you do that. At 12.7k steps a day, I basically have to elongate my walking commute, and find create ways to stand up and move all day.
This article (only a summary in the link below because we still live in the dark ages of research paywalls) from the Annals of Internal Medicine claims via meta-analysis that exposure to sitting will harm your health regardless of exercise.<p><a href="http://annals.org/aim/article/2091327/sedentary-time-its-association-risk-disease-incidence-mortality-hospitalization-adults" rel="nofollow">http://annals.org/aim/article/2091327/sedentary-time-its-ass...</a>
I do yoga for my back and ensure there's good lumbar support on any chair I sit on. They say sitting is the 'new cancer' and prevention is often the way to go. Here's an interesting article on some yoga exercises you can try for back pain: <a href="http://www.buzzle.com/articles/yoga-exercises-for-back-pain.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.buzzle.com/articles/yoga-exercises-for-back-pain....</a>
For the time constrained: go running. You can do it almost anywhere, with minimal equipment. It's a means of transport. It's very efficient in terms of calories per minute. Downside is you end up looking like a runner not a buff dude. You can level up the intensity if you have less time etc.
I bought a teeter hangup about a week ago. So far it helps. After a long day, spend 5 minutes inverted.<p>What I also do is running, in the office. Yes! Our building is pretty big, whenever I go to one of the office on the far side, I do some running. I even sprint up the stairs when I can.
This doesn’t hold up to all sedentary modes of living. Monks sit all day but appear in some cases to have cells absurdly younger than chronological baseline.
All, this isn't a legitimate news source -- heck they're not even a legitimate scientific group. It is a dude that is republishing some data.
I'm reluctant to be this commenter, but this honestly reads like "sky is blue" kind of thinking.<p>Worse: it is likely that nobody knows the "best" formula for physical-activity-unto-staying-young. Think about how difficult a problem this is.<p>And even if there were a plausible, scientifically defensible answer in terms of the effect of specific routines on a sample population, it's still very difficult to <i>generally</i> apply it.<p>There's room for good common sense here: do what makes you feel good, what seems to increase your fitness, and what you can do without causing serious injury.<p>Right?
Stand or sit? Which is worse for my butt? If I sit all day, I'll have one of those squashed flat butts. But if I stand all day, will I have droopy butt?
"We found that women who sat longer did not have shorter telomere length if they exercised for at least 30 minutes a day"<p>In other words, you can't exercise away an unhealthy life style.<p>That's very similar to diet. In fact, the big 3 (diet, exercise, and sleep) taken together are far greater than the sum of their parts.<p>As a developer with a full time job, and side projects, I can easily find myself sitting in a chair for 12+ hours a day. I recently purchased a standing desk, and will be using a timer to remind myself when to break for 15-20 minutes for outdoor exercise.<p>I have forced myself to limit eating out to once per week. And use a sleep tracker to track my sleep, holding myself to getting the right amount, on average, every month.