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Researchers may have discovered how much exercise it takes to offset a day of sitting

Updated Jan 3rd, 2023 3:56PM EST
A young man running on a treadmill at home.
Image: Ljupco Smokovski/Adobe

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Daily exercise is important, but many of us spend most of our days sitting in our office chairs, working on computers. If you’re one of the millions of people who spend too much time at their desks, you can offset that sedentary lifestyle. In fact, scientists have now figured out exactly how much exercise you need to do each day to offset an entire day of sitting around.

According to new research on daily exercise, researchers say you will need to do at least 30-40 minutes of sweat-building exercise each day if you want to balance out 10 hours of sitting still. Further, even just standing up can help offset the damage done to your body by sitting around all day.

The research is based on data gathered from a meta-analysis study back in 2020 that analyzed nine previous studies. Those studies included over 44,000 people from four different countries who used some form of fitness tracker. From here, the analysis found that daily exercise reduced the risk of death among those with sedentary lifestyles.

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Based on this data, it sounds like folks spending much of their day in the office should either invest in something like a standing desk or try to take part in fairly vigorous daily exercise. And this isn’t even being done to help push weight loss, either. This is just to help offset the damage done to our bodies by sitting around for long hours each day.

Of course, more research into this matter is definitely expected, and with researchers already looking into ways to create exercise benefits in a pill, we could see other data about this type of thing surfacing, too. What is important to keep in mind about this is that daily exercise is great for more than just keeping your weight down.

Exercise also helps drive vital functions in your body, the benefits of which are clearly on display in this new research.

Josh Hawkins has been writing for over a decade, covering science, gaming, and tech culture. He also is a top-rated product reviewer with experience in extensively researched product comparisons, headphones, and gaming devices.

Whenever he isn’t busy writing about tech or gadgets, he can usually be found enjoying a new world in a video game, or tinkering with something on his computer.