Despite what many wellness gurus, podcast experts and editors will have us believe, sitting is not the new smoking.
It is worth bearing in mind that most people who advocate these strong absolutes and black and white opinions usually have something to sell…
It is a huge over simplification to say that sitting is the cause of many aches, pains and detrimental to our joints and general health – what about people who farm all day, do they not suffer with any joint issues?
How about manual labourers, are they ok because they don’t sit much? Or the person that works at a desk but trains for ultra marathons every night or hits the gym? What about someone who trains mobility but drinks versus a wheelchair user who eats excellently? Do professional athletes, gymnasts and dancers experience no aches then?
Very quickly the attention grabbing headline of ‘sitting is the new smoking’ makes less and less sense.
There are too many variables in the human experience to single out one to demonise and if we could successfully identify the singular root cause of pain and discomfort in such simplistic terms we could eradicate pain from multiple populations.
A favourite back up argument is that we are not designed to sit or that originally we spent time squatting for long periods and the suggestion is that lack of this ancestral primal movement is why we struggle with joint issues and lack of health and mobility.
Could most of us do with moving more? Probably, but this argument is reductionist and skips the most wonderful fact about the human body- we are highly adaptable.
Modern life has changed but so have we. Adaptation can work both ways, positively and negatively and when we have the privilege of being able to move our bodies we should and emphasise physical activity but comparing sedentary behaviour to the established cancer, heart and respiratory risks is exaggerated.
Doing more on the floor is great if we can but sitting for long periods cannot always be helped and as with most things balance is key. Wellness providers often like to pathologise everyday normal activities as a way to groom us to their point of view or latest sales funnel – how many times have we heard we are breathing wrong, sleeping wrong, sitting wrong, relaxing wrong, our posture needs improving or our gait needs changing, our form needs improvement- and the list goes on. The vast majority of which have no grounded unbiased studies or evidence.
Filter the information, consider the source and changing your mind about something is of course healthy but we also don’t need to condem daily activities, stigmatise sitting, castigate the human story or create movement scapegoats that are normal parts of daily life.