Be more active at work Reducing our inactivity at work Be more healthy Dr Morag Thow

1. Be more active at work Reducing our inactivity at work Be more healthy Dr Morag Thow Ms Sarah Mitchell Ms Margaret Brownlee

2. Focus for today? • Sitting and our posture • Reducing our sitting time • Walking and exercising at work more

3. Sitting has increased in all our lives! • Computers • TV • Cars • More mechanization

4. Our sitting time? Talk to partner beside you 1. How much do you sit at work? 2. When you go home do you sit a lot?

5. Poor sitting posture!

6. Very bad effects of sitting!

7. Improve your sitting station

8. Improve your sitting posture • Gravity is working on us all the time. • Think tall: imagine a string on top of your head, pulling you up. • Do seated exercises.

9. Do seated exercises, if you can’t stand • Neck rotation • Shoulder shrug • Wrist rolling • Open and close fingers • Resisted bicep curls • Toe raises • Forward bend • Rotate spine • Side stretch • Knee to chest • Knee lifts, foot back • Sunshine!

10. We can now sit in a better posture BUT … … sitting for long periods is bad, and seats are EVIL. EVIL!!

11. Prolonged sitting is bad. Seats are EVIL !

12. What has happened over time • Increases in inactivity • Decrease in activity

13. Why is sitting so bad? • Each 1-hour increment in sitting time was found to be associated with an 11% and an 18% increased risk of all-cause and Cardiovascular Disease mortality, respectively (Dunstan et al Circulation 2010). • Less time sitting prolongs life (Hidde et al Arch Intern Med. 2012).

14. This is what happens when we sit for periods>1 hour • Electrical signals to legs shut down. • Calorie burning reduces 1% per minute. • Good protective cholesterol drops 20%. • Blood sugar starts to rise. • Insulin effectiveness reduces.

15. Avoiding sedentarism/sitting • Don’t sit for long periods of time. • Break up your sitting as much as you can. • Introduce inconvenience into your daily life! • What can you do to break up periods of sitting and introduce inconvenience?

16. How can we stop sitting so much? • With partner: how can you Introduce inconvenience into your daily life? • Here’s one idea: put a yellow sticky on your computer saying ‘Get up every hour!’ Get up every hour!!

17. Some solutions! • Stand for a time to work. • Have meetings standing. • If you chair a meeting, get group to stand every hour.

18. More solutions! • Install a screen saver to stop working every hour. • Walk to water station and printer. • Stand up to talk on the phone.

19. STAND UP NOW! • Standing is better than sitting!

20. More walking and exercising at work

21. Physical Activity Recommendations • So what type of, and how much, activity should we all be doing to benefit our health?

22. Aerobic Exercise • What is aerobic exercise? • What does it do for our health & well-being?

23. Aerobic Exercise & Fitness • Activities which increase your heart and breathing rates. AND • Which you can do continuously for a fairly long time. Decreases your risk of : • Early mortality • Heart disease, stroke, diabetes Also improves: • Weight management • Functional independence

24. Guidelines: Aerobic Fitness • Moderate intensity activity for 30 minutes on at least 5 days per week (150 mins per week MINIMUM) OR/and • Vigorous intensity activity for 20 minutes on 3 days per week • 30 mins can be done in 3 × 10-minute bouts!

25. BORG Scale: How it should feel Overload

26. Try to build in 30 mins walking • 3 × 10 minutes × 5 days = minimum recommendations for health • Only 150 mins per week! • Needs to be at 100-130 beats per min! • (‘Staying alive’, Bee Gees = 104 BPM)

27. Have you found this useful!! Perhaps you might donate a small sum to the Hospice? Website : www.svh.co.uk St Vincent's Hospice Midton Road, Howwood, Renfrewshire PA9 1AF Tel: 01505 705635