Sitting Too Much is Bad for Your Heart—Even If You Exercise, Study Finds
A study published in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology found that if you sit or lie down for more than 10.5 hours a day, exercising may not be enough to prevent the risk of heart issues.
Researchers aimed to study how sedentary behavior, measured by fitness trackers, is linked to the risk of certain heart-related problems and how it relates to moderate to vigorous physical activity.
The study examined nearly 90,000 people in a UK biobank cohort study. The individuals had an average age of 62 and wore fitness trackers for a week to measure activity levels.
Sitting too much and maintaining a sedentary lifestyle has long been known to be detrimental to health. The study backed this up, reporting that those who did not regularly exercise faced the greatest health risks from this much daily sedentary time. Researchers found those who sat for at least 10.6 hours and didn't exercise had a 40 percent higher risk of heart failure and a 54 percent higher risk of cardiovascular mortality compared to those who sat less.
But reducing sedentary behavior appears to be important even among otherwise physically active individuals, as researchers wrote in the study.
Those who managed at least 150 minutes of moderate-to-vigorous physical activity per week but had otherwise sedentary behavior also showed heart health risks—regardless of meeting current activity standards, according to the Physical Activity Guidelines for Adults. This group had a 15 percent risk of experiencing heart failure and 33 percent risk of dying from a cardiovascular-related issue compared to groups that sat less overall.
That's not to say regular exercise is useless. Past studies and health experts support that small amounts of exercise can have significant health benefits. Simply replacing 30 minutes of sit time each day with any type of physical activity can lower heart health risks, Charles Eaton, M.D., M.S., and Director of the Brown University Department of Family Medicine, told the American College of Cardiology.
Still, study authors believe that future guidelines and public health efforts should better stress the importance of cutting down on sedentary time for heart health. Ultimately, people need to get moving more.
“Avoiding more than 10.6 hours per day may be a realistic minimal target for better heart health," says Shaan Khurshid, MD, MPH, cardiologist at the Massachusetts General Hospital, and co-senior author of the study.
