Rolling With It

Yes, Active Sitting Can Benefit Your Body

People with desk jobs are tired of sitting all day. So much so, in fact, that many are bringing their gym equipment to work with them in the effort to combine the daily grind with fitness. In a surprising leap of innovation, people from executives to administrative assistants are swapping out their office chairs for fitness balls in the effort to tone their glutes and quads while alleviating the aches and pains that sedentary work can cause, says Prevention magazine.

Why Traditional Office Chairs Cause Pain

One reason office chairs seem so uncomfortable is the result of poor posture. When you sit down to work each day, your body settles in, your abdominal muscles relax and your core muscles take a break. The seat of the chair, no matter how ergonomically designed, bears the brunt of your body weight. Poor posture means your body is not naturally aligned, and when you sit for extended periods in misalignment, your muscular and skeletal structures suffer, according to Prevention.

You might have heard “sitting is the new smoking” lately (or seen the hashtag #sittingisthenewsmoking), and if you haven't, it’s probably time to research it for yourself and make decisions with the facts it mind.


To compare sitting to smoking may seem like a harsh comparison because 480,000 people a year die from smoking, and you might be thinking “Are 480,000 people really dying a year or will be dying per year from sitting?”

Well… No. Not exactly, but perhaps we should all start reflecting on how many sedentary hours in our lives we can begin to modify.

For a brief time in my life I had a personal trainer who always steered me in the right direction. One day he asked me who had a better metabolism: middle school teachers or individuals who spent two hours at the gym every night? Anticipating the plot twist, I firmly stated “teachers” with as much false confidence one could have with fingers spread in high plank and watching beads of her own sweat fall to the mat 90 seconds in.

“Right, but do you know why?” He asked, and of course, I didn’t.