Have Sitting-On-Your-Butt-All-Day-Itis?

This 5-minute trick can change your workday!

On average, most of us spend about 7.7 hours sitting (while other figures show that some of us may log as many as 15 in butt-meets-chair mode). Plenty of research has shown that too much sitting can wreak havoc on your health: It could make you depressed, it's associated with a 125 percent risk in cardiovascular incidents (i.e., heart pain or heart attack), greater waist circumference, and even a 50 percent risk of death due to any cause. Um, gulp.

Now, according to a small new study, there may be a super-quick and easy trick that could help reverse the adverse effects of sitting.The trick? Taking a short 5-minute walk for every one hour that you spend sitting down. Here's why.

Indiana University researchers recruited 11 healthy men of normal weights, ages 20 to 35, and attached blood-pressure cuffs and ultrasound equipment to them while they sat still for three hours. During that period, the function of the femoral artery—a main artery, located in your thigh, that provides oxygenated blood to leg tissues—decreased by about 50 percent. But those participants who got up and walked around for five minutes during each of the three hours of sitting did not experience the decrease. In fact, their arteries kept working normally; researchers suspect that muscle movement helped keeping blood flowing normally.

There are other proven benefits to standing up in lieu of sitting too—for example, if you simply stand for an extra three hours a day, you burn as many calories in a year as running 10 marathons.

I've got an itching to go for a walk now! Do you make it a point to get up and walk around during your long-sitting days?

Source:glamour.com/health-fitness/blogs/vitamin-g/2014/09/short-walk-workday