The Evidence

An Exercise Regimen Everyone Can Squeeze In

The following article was written by Emmanuel Stamatakis and published in The Conversation on the 21st February 2019. Have you recently carried heavy shopping bags up a few flights of stairs? Or run the last 100 metres to the station to catch your train? If you have, you may have unknowingly been doing a style of exercise called high-intensity incidental physical activity. Our paper, published today in the British Journal of Sports Medicine, shows this type of regular, incidental activity that gets you huffing and puffing is likely to produce health benefits, even if you do it in 30-second bursts, spread over the day. In fact, incorporating more high intensity activity into our daily routines – whether that’s by vacuuming the carpet with vigour or walking uphill to buy your lunch – could be the key to helping all of us get some high quality exercise each day. And that includes people who are overweight and unfit. What is high intensity exercise? Until recently, most health authorities prescribed activity lasting for at least ten continuous minutes, although there was no credible scientific evidence behind this. This recommendation was recently refuted by the 2018 US Physical Activity Guidelines Advisory Report. The new…

Six Strategies For Sitting Less

Six Strategies for Sitting Less Scratching your head on how your team can BeUpstanding? A recent study by Hadgraft and colleagues and published in the journal BMC Public Health, explored office workers attitudes around reducing workplace sitting. They also sought out workers opinions on a variety of strategies aimed at reducing occupational sitting, which were commonly identified from previous workplace interventions, and their perceived barriers to achieving this in the workplace.  A number of strategies were viewed as acceptable and likely to be adopted by workers with some of the strategies addressing multiple influences on sitting and catering to a range of different jobs and preferences.  Why not give some of the strategies a try in your workplace! Make use of standing meeting. Sick of sitting through endless meetings? Look to change it up by changing your posture. A standing meeting can be used for a quick check in with the team, while putting stand and stretch breaks into the agenda can help your team reset and refocus. Why not step it up by having a walking meeting for those one-on-one catch ups! Communicating face-to-face. Whenever there’s a short message to be conveyed to a co-worker, employees can tell the…

Navigate