Are You a Professional Sitter?

 This month’s blog post is an excerpt from my third book, Your Job Is Killing You: A User's Guide to Sneaking Exercise into Your Work Day, which will be published later this year. If you like this — or any of the excerpts you’ve read from any of my books — please buy a copy. Authors depend on sales to pay the bills. If you’re in Ottawa, you can contact me to purchase your copy. If you’re elsewhere in the world, you can visit Amazon ​to purchase a paperback or e-book version.

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Are You a Professional Sitter?

​Do you work in a knowledge-based environment? That is, do you spend most of your working life either at a desk or at a table in a meeting room? If so, then congratulations, you are officially a professional sitter! But you’re not alone. Many adults around the world spend 50 per cent (or more!) of their waking hours mostly sitting.

You know who you are — office workers who nab the first available seat on the daily commute, colleagues who remain seated during the breaks in meetings (seriously, the seat belt sign is off, you’ve been granted permission to move about the cabin), individuals who opt for the elevator/escalator/moving sidewalk instead of employing the heel-toe express, “watch watchers” who take a seat and await the timer countdown on their microwaved lunch. You get the gist — too much sitting and not enough moving. 

My slogan is “move more, feel better.” This simple message holds much power: the solution to your aches and pains, lack of motivation, and foggy brain is in your control. You can do it! Get off your butt and move about the cabin.
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As my client Janice said, “This is needed! I am retired after 35 years at a desk, getting up only to sit in a meeting. Only in the last few years was there recognition of the need to move more during the day. Good luck with your book!”

​And I’m not the only one who feels this way. Take biomechanist and movement guru Katy Bowman. I’ve been reading her books for years, following her social media posts, and sharing her insights with my clients. You could say we’re kindred spirits in the world of natural movement. And she even has a book to help people incorporate stretches and movements at work. Bowman, like many of us in the world of practical fitness, feels strongly about more movement, more of the time:

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“For decades, researchers have been trying to figure out the best way to organize the body for optimal performance  at the office. The underlying flaw in much of the research—or at least in the presentation of the research—is that it fails to highlight the use of a single position as the problem. Our quest to find an optimal position for stillness will always be frustrated by the problems inherent in a lack of movement.”*

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Copyright, 2019 by Amanda Sterczyk, all rights reserved.

*Katy Bowman, Don’t Just Sit There: Transitioning to a Standing and Dynamic Workstation for Whole-Body Health (United States of America: Propriometrics Press, 2015), p. 10. Reprinted with permission.