Nonexercise

There's a fascinating concept called "nonexercise". Have you heard of it? If not, it's roughly reverse to the concept of "catching up on sleep."

You'll often hear people say that they didn't sleep very well during the week, but they're going to try to catch up on sleep during the weekend. Their idea is that a solid ten hours of sleep will refresh them and undo the damage done by a recent lack of sleep. Unfortunately, sleep scientists have shown time and again that catching up on sleep doesn't work.

In the same way, office workers are becoming more and more aware of the dangers of a sedentary lifestyle and the damage that eight hours a day in a chair can do. Office workers are becoming more agreeable to the ideas of exercising and working out. But exercising for an hour or two a week cannot undo the damage inflicted by sitting to the discs, ligaments, and muscles of the low back.

This is where the idea of "nonexercise" comes in. Nonexercise is all the daily activities that you do which give support to your low back, and can be as simple as standing for a while. These are the postures and activities that truly prevent low back pain and disc damage. In other words, simply remaining active during a day can be more beneficial than exercising regularly.

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For office workers, this can be as simple as requesting a standing workstation instead of a sitting workstation. Simply by standing for several hours a day, there is far less pressure on the discs of the low back, and the muscles of the back are forced to remain strong and provide extra stability to the spine when needed most.

Although the ideas of remaining active and avoiding sitting have been part of the chiropractic language for many years, I first became aware of the term "nonexercise" in a 2010 article in Men's Health. Here are a couple excerpts, but the whole thing is definitely worth reading.

Make no mistake: "Regularly exercising is not the same as being active," says Peter Katzmarzyk, Ph.D., Hamilton's colleague at Pennington, the nation's leading obesity research center. Katzmarzyk is referring to the difference between official exercise activity, such as running, biking, or lifting weights, and so-called nonexercise activity, like walking to your car, mowing the lawn, or simply standing. "A person may hit the gym every day, but if he's sitting a good deal of the rest of the time, he's probably not leading an overall active life," says Katzmarzyk.

You might dismiss this as scientific semantics, but energy expenditure statistics support Katzmarzyk's notion. In a 2007 report, University of Missouri scientists said that people with the highest levels of nonexercise activity (but little to no actual "exercise") burned significantly more calories a week than those who ran 35 miles a week but accumulated only a moderate amount of nonexercise activity.

"It can be as simple as standing more," Katzmarzyk says. For instance, a "standing" worker—say, a sales clerk at a Banana Republic store—burns about 1,500 calories while on the job; a person behind a desk might expend roughly 1,000 calories. That goes a long way in explaining why people gain 16 pounds, on average, within 8 months of starting sedentary office work, according to a study from the University of North Carolina at Wilmington.

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Do you sit all day at a desk? You're courting muscle stiffness, poor balance and mobility, and lower-back, neck, and hip pain. But to understand why, you'll need a quick primer on fascia, a tough connective tissue that covers all your muscles. While fascia is pliable, it tends to "set" in the position your muscles are in most often. So if you sit most of the time, your fascia adapts to that specific position.

Now think about where your hips and thighs are in relation to your torso while you're sitting. They're bent, which causes the muscles on the front of your thighs, known as hip flexors, to contract slightly, or shorten. The more you sit, the more the fascia will keep your hip flexors shortened. "If you've ever seen a guy walk with a forward lean, it's often because of shortened hip flexors," says Hartman. "The muscles don't stretch as they naturally should. As a result, he's not walking tall and straight because his fascia has adapted more to sitting than standing."

This same effect can be seen in other areas of your body. For instance, if you spend a lot of time with your shoulders and upper back slumped over a keyboard, this eventually becomes your normal posture. "That's not just an issue in terms of how you look; it frequently leads to chronic neck and shoulder pain," says Hartman. Also, people who frequently cross their legs a certain way can experience hip imbalances. "This makes your entire lower body less stable, which decreases your agility and athletic performance and increases your risk for injuries," Hartman says. Add all this up, and a person who sits a lot is less efficient not only at exercising, but also at simply moving from, say, the couch to the refrigerator.

As shown above, low back pain from sitting is very closely related to neck and shoulder pain from sitting. More:

So what's a desk jockey to do? Hamilton's advice: Think in terms of two spectrums of activity. One represents the activities you do that are considered regular exercise. But another denotes the amount of time you spend sitting versus the time you spend on your feet. "Then every day, make the small choices that will help move you in the right direction on that sitting-versus-standing spectrum," says Hamilton. "Stand while you're talking on the phone. It all adds up, and it all matters."