Sitting is the new smoking. Here's what to do about it.

We know the perils of smoking. Yet remarkably little is published about the seemingly innocuous activity of sitting in a chair.

Former NASA scientist Dr Joan Vernikos has compared prolonged sitting to being weightless in space and the effects on the body are similarly devastating.

Sitting causes the abdominals to lose tone and strength, creates immobility in the hips, and shortens the hip flexors. The result is chronic lower back pain, compromised lumbar spinal discs and a cascade of postural problems. It is estimated that 55% of working people in the UK experience back pain (Institute for Employment Studies, 2020).

The damage doesn't stop there.

Prolonged sitting negatively impacts blood pressure, blood sugar regulation and the body's ability to burn fat. This in turn affects metabolic rate which has been shown to be a significant factor in recovery from illness and a predictor of overall health and life expectancy (Malhotra, 2020).

Despite advances in almost every area of modern life, our health and wellbeing is not among them. We spend more on pharmaceutical medicine than at any point in history, yet average life expectancy is now in decline. The mental health crisis continues to deepen and quality of life for many is quietly deteriorating. The science is becoming hard to ignore. Our daily habits and sedentary lifestyle are generating chronic health problems on a vast scale.

Dr David Raichlen, Professor of Biological Sciences, studied the Hadza tribe in Tanzania and found that while they also experienced long periods of inactivity, there was a crucial difference in how they rested. Rather than sitting in chairs, they rested in postures — squatting or kneeling — that required their muscles to maintain low levels of continuous activity. The problem is not rest. It is the particular way the Western world has come to rest.

I am not convinced that most of us in the West are willing or able to overhaul our sitting habits overnight. But we can take regular breaks and we can begin to reactivate the muscles that prolonged chair-sitting effectively puts to sleep.

This is where yoga comes in.

Yoga is, at its core, the systematic study of the human body in movement. Refined over thousands of years, it focuses on healthy, functional movement and the restoration of the body.

There have been many attempts to Westernise yoga and strip it to its most marketable elements, but in my experience this is like replacing butter with margarine. It may spread more easily, but something essential is lost.

A well-designed yoga sequence feels like bringing the body home. It can be challenging but there is often a quality of deep recognition, as if the movement is something we were always meant to do.

One of the fundamental yoga postures is the yogi squat. It may be one of the most powerful antidotes to a chair-based life. Where sitting in a chair switches off critical muscle groups, the yogi squat activates them, lengthens them and builds strength. Throughout human history, squatting has been the natural resting position for working, cooking, giving birth, socialising and using the bathroom. A full resting squat with heels towards the ground, long spine and open hips is a natural functional state.

Notice how effortlessly toddlers squat.

Then notice how, somewhere along the way, we are conditioned out of it entirely into genuinely alien patterns for our bodies.

In my years of teaching yoga I have observed that the squat is not the exclusive domain of dancers, martial artists or the obsessively fit. Nor is it limited by age. The body retains a remarkable capacity to adapt at any stage of life (Lieberman, 2020). I believe that squatting and many other fundamental yoga postures are not aspirational, they are in our DNA.

We don't need to reinvent ourselves. We need to come home to ourselves.

Dr Aseem Malhotra 2020

Daniel Lieberman's book Exercised 2020