1. What is the health or fitness theme of the article?

The health or fitness theme of the article is to warn people about the danger of continuously sitting
for most of the day encourage people to perform regular physical movement beyond their daily
exercise for physical, mental and emotional wellbeing.

2. Summarize the key element from the article in one paragraph.

Technological advancements have brought convenience to us in many ways that we can execute a
task without moving much. Sitting down for hours after hours in educational institutions and even
at workplace has become our regular norms. Sitting stops fat and sugar breakdown, increases risk
of heart attack, invites lethargy and brain fog, increase weight and obesity and slowly takes us
towards death. It is pointed out that modern social gathering events have two negative aspects that
concern us more; firstly, abundance of junk food and secondly, abundance of chairs. Therefore,
we may introduce desk-standing classrooms at educational institutions and chair-strapped
workplace at organizations for meetings and social gatherings. We need to integrate two to four
minutes of exercise every few hours during our workday. Moreover, in order to avoid longer
sitting, we can take stairs to move to another floor or building rather than just calling a person,
drink a lot of water so that it allows us to frequently move to respond to natural call, park cars far
from the regular parking area so that it fills our walking exercise, sit on the floors so that we need
frequent movement to adjust our body to the hard floor surface and meet in person, avoiding phone
calls as much as possible. Benefits from these practices are more than precious. Movement such
as, frequent walking beyond our regular exercises (morning walk or gymnasium) not only helps
us to avoid the aforementioned health hazards, but also makes us more alert, task-driven, positive
with increased productivity.

3. What is the most interesting fact that you learned from the article? As well as the least
interesting fact from the article?

Two facts mentioned in the article seem most interesting to me. Firstly, according to Neilson
Research, adults spent 63 percent more time on smartphones in 2017 than in 2015. It also means
that adults have reduced their movement 63 percent more in 2017 than in 2015. Secondly,
according to Mayo Clinic cardiologist Martha Grogan, the risk of heart attack is about the same as
smoking for those who sit most of day. The fact that seems least interesting to me is that 96 percent
of elementary schools in the U.S. no longer provide physical education.

4. How does the article relate to you or your family?

The article is related to not only me, but also the members of my family. As a university student,
I spend most of the time on my smartphones either browsing social media or playing games. When
I use smartphones, I prefer sitting either on public transport, cars or at classroom and home. I also
spend my daytime during weekdays at classrooms by sitting most of the time. Moreover, I have
become overweight, experiencing high pressure, often feeling lonely and obese. Now I feel that
my sitting may have caused these negative consequences. Referring to my family as well, my
younger brother use smartphone most of the day. My mother and sister spend most of the day by
watching and sitting in front of TV. My father also has to sit for long time at work during working
days. I think all of them are at risk of blood pressure and heart attack. I would like to implement
the suggestions provided in the article to myself and my family from now on.

Reference:

Trotter, S. (2018). Moving beyond your daily exercise. Breaking Muscle. Retrieved from:
https://breakingmuscle.com/fitness/moving-beyond-your-daily-exercise
 Appendix: The Article

Moving Beyond Your Daily Exercise

Shane Trotter
Coach
Mansfield, Texas, United States
Strength and Conditioning, Kettlebells, Youth Development

Seemingly, you do everything right. You eat sensibly and reach the American
Heart Association’s recommended 75 minutes of vigorous exercise and 150
minutes of moderate exercise each week. But what about those other 9,855
minutes? After eight hours of sleep, we are still left with 7,755 waking minutes.

It is increasingly possible to navigate life without ever moving. This disturbing

reality whacked me over the head when I heard my two-year-old nephew bossing
Google around. “Hey Google, play Sesame Street.”

We can now ask Alexa to deliver what once merited a trip to the grocery store. This
past Christmas, rather than plugging in the Christmas tree each night, I stepped
on a button on the floor. As harmless as that sounds, we may soon lose the ability
to descend to the floor to reach for an awkward plug. Life has grown so convenient
as to never require more than a few simple movements. Varied, creative
movement is essential to our physical, mental, and emotional health. When we
allow our bodies to atrophy to the point that we can no longer experience the joy
of movement, we lose the foundation of our wellbeing.

How Bad Is It?

The problem is only getting worse. A 2015 study sampled over 2,500 teens and
found that they averaged almost nine hours on “entertainment media” each day,
excluding time spent at school and doing homework. For most students, this fills
every non-school hour. Worse, the school day is basically seven hours of sitting,
broken by a few brief walks to their next assigned chair.

This problem follows us into adulthood. Nielson Research found that adults spent
63% more time on their smartphone in 2017 than in 2015. As Senator Ben Sasse
remarks in his book, The Vanishing American Adult, we are consumed by “social
affluence that allows us to entertain ourselves to death.”
Does This Really Matter If You Are Working Out?
The short answer is yes!

Citing a study from the National Institute of Health1, a New York Times survey
found that:

“It doesn’t matter if you go running every morning, or you’re a regular at the gym.
If you spend most of the rest of the day sitting—in your car, your office chair, on
your sofa at home—you are putting yourself at increased risk of obesity, diabetes,
heart disease, a variety of cancers and an early death.

When we sit, the breakdown of fats and sugars stalls and our body down-regulates.
According to Mayo Clinic cardiologist Martha Grogan, “For people who sit most of
the day, their risk of heart attack is about the same as smoking.”2

Sitting invites lethargy and brain fog. For many, this malaise has become the
default state. We have become content to work out for an hour a day, only to sit
and stare at a computer for the next eight hours. Then we sit in a car for the drive
home, sit and eat dinner, and sit and watch TV before heading to bed. After the
work week, we may even reward ourselves with a full day on the couch binging
Netflix or watching sports. A sedentary weekend is far more common than one
filled with play and physical activity.

Exercise is often a Band-aid applied to a gaping wound: a life devoid of human

movement. While an improvement, exercise alone is not sufficient. As the age of
automation prepares to rev into overdrive, it is increasingly important to
examine our environments to intentionally integrate consistent movement.

Creating Opportunities to Move

We must understand frequent movement is essential for cognitive, emotional, and
physical wellbeing. We must create structures to promote movement. Perhaps we
break our workday every few hours for two to four minutes of exercise. Other
methods include:
 Take the stairs.
 Get a standing desk. These can be inexpensive.
 Have walking meetings.
 Drink a lot of water. You’ll have to get up and go!
 Get a dog that needs a walk twice a day.
 Sit on the floor to read, work, and watch TV. You will need to constantly re-
adjust and move.
 Bike to work.
 Park in the furthest possible parking spot.
 Create no-phone zones and screen-based technology boundaries. An object at
rest tends to stay at rest. Falling into the phone trap less frequently can only
help.

Move, Even When It Means Swimming Upstream

You would love to move more at work, but feel stuck in meetings, cubicles,
commutes, and other ever-present societal expectations to sit. Every modern
social gathering features two things: enough junk food to feed a small nation, and
an abundance of chairs. I invite you to shrug off this pressure, get creative, and
risk being weird. Max Shank inspired me to stretch between flights. I will offend no
one by stretching, but I felt deeply uncomfortable at first. If expressing a desire to
move after many hours confined on a flight makes you the weird one, embrace it.

Still, many work environments make it very tough to move. This is the final frontier
that we as a society must address. As the diseases of seated affluence
proliferate, we must address the chair-strapped workplace environment.

Encouraging movement can benefit an employer’s bottom line through increased

productivity.
Workers who use sit-stand workstations “unanimously claim to be more alert, task-
driven, and positive.”

Schools are the most important area to address, as they pass on cultural
values to the next generation. Students now grow up conditioned to seek
sedentary entertainment, even as their mental, emotional, and physical
health grow epidemically poor. The CDC reports that over 30% of children between
ages 2 and 19 are now overweight or obese.3 Rather than addressing rampant
childhood obesity and the habits that create it, we’ve de-emphasized physical
education, as 96% of elementary schools no longer offer P.E. 4 Rather than
prioritize human thriving, we compel our youth to sit through a broad and superficial
education, instead of immersive, experiential human development.
Do not throw up your hands, concluding that the world has gone to hell in a
handbasket. We must implore those in authority in our businesses and schools to
alter the environment. In the meantime, we can each take responsibility for
ourselves as individuals. Your actions can influence others more than you
know. Live the solution to create the momentum of change.

References:

1. Diaz, Keith M., Virginia J. Howard, Brent Hutto, Natalie Colabianchi, John E. Vena, Monika M.
Safford, Steven N. Blair, and Steven P. Hooker. "Patterns of sedentary behavior and mortality in
US Middle-aged and older adults: a national cohort study."Annals of internal medicine 167, no. 7
(2017): 465-475.
2. Winslow, R. The guide to beating a heart attack: first line defense is lowering risk, even when
genetics isn’t on your side. The Wall Street Journal. April 16, 2012. Accessed November 25, 2016.
3. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention "CDC grand rounds: childhood obesity in the
United States." MMWR. Morbidity and mortality weekly report 60, no. 2 (2011): 42.
4. US Department of Health and Human Services. "Results from the School Health Policies and
Practices Study 2014."Washington, DC: Author (2015).