Top Neuroscientist: Being sedentary is killing you - here's why you need to embrace consistent low grade exercise like walking THROUGHOUT the day
A New Way of Being
Simon Mundie
4.8 • 523 Ratings
🗓️ 23 August 2024
⏱️ 13 minutes
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Summary
Being sedentary is a killer. Our ancestors walked 15 plus miles a day most days of the week. Not for its health benefits, but because it was weaved into their day naturally. The problem now is that our lives are designed to be sedentary - think cars, desks and sofas - and so we have to be very conscious about fitting in regular lower level exercise like walking THROUGHOUT the day. Just going to the gym after work won't cut it - in fact it may be counterproductive. Here's what we talk about in this episode
- The five key personality traits negatively impacted by being sedentary
- The sedentary component for depression
- Which TYPES of anxiety are ameliorated by reducing a sedentary lifestyle
- Mobility and its effect on inflammation
- The relationship between movement and cortisol
- The negative impact of being sedentary and then working out in the gym in a one-hour burst
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello, Simon here, welcome back. Are you more sedentary than you would like to be? |
| 0:20.5 | I know I am, even though I'm conscious of |
| 0:23.8 | getting up and going for walks and taking movement breaks throughout the day and exercising when time |
| 0:30.3 | allows. But the fact of the matter is, relative to our ancestors, we are unbelievably more sedentary and it comes at a huge cost, |
| 0:41.3 | which is the subject of this episode with Professor Shane O'Mara, |
| 0:46.0 | who talks about some of the impacts that a sedentary life can have on us, |
| 0:49.3 | as well as sharing some real valuable insights into low-grade activity done consistently throughout the day, |
| 0:57.2 | for example, going for walks. |
| 1:04.4 | Hippocrates, one of the most outstanding figures in the history of medicine, the father |
| 1:07.7 | of medicine, as he's known by many, came out with the quote, didn't he, |
| 1:11.3 | that walking is the best medicine. Now, we're very much a sedentary bunch, aren't we? |
| 1:15.4 | Dodgy hips, myself, from sitting down too much, weak, sleepy glutes. And you say |
| 1:22.2 | inactivity means less muscle volume, less muscle strength. But interestingly as well, |
| 1:29.9 | it means our brains start to wither. |
| 1:30.9 | Yeah, of course. |
| 1:33.4 | And we have bodies that are built for movement. |
| 1:38.1 | And we have bodies that profit from and get back from movement. |
| 1:43.9 | So to give you a simple example, we now know, for example, that if you're engaging in lots of walking, the kind of inflammatory |
| 1:45.5 | factors in the bloodstream drop down when you do lots of walking. And molecules produced in muscle |
| 1:52.0 | leak into the brain and facilitate resilience in your brain. So there's one that goes by the |
| 1:58.5 | acronym SMVEGF, which stands for skeletal myofiber, vascular endothelial growth factor. |
| 2:04.9 | And when you unpack that, all it really refers to is a molecule that helps the vasculature. |
... |
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