Movement Breaks: Stay Active & Healthy At Work

Have you ever been so absorbed in your work that you suddenly realise you haven't moved for a good couple of hours? You've sat there, hunched over your keyboard, eyes glued to your monitor.

You've been working through emails, writing a report or moving from one online meeting to the next.

You might have noticed that your shoulders feel tense, your back has become stiff and your concentration isn't quite what it was earlier in the day.

Now, your instinct may be to carry on, and I completely get that.

You're busy, you're making progress, and stopping even briefly can feel unproductive.

But taking a couple of minutes to move may be one of the best things that you can do at that point, both for how you feel and for your long-term health.

Movement breaks are short periods of activity that interrupt time spent sitting or remaining in one position.

Now, they don't need to involve a workout and you shouldn't need to get changed or work up a sweat.

A movement break could be as simple as walking to get a drink, climbing a flight of stairs, stretching your legs or moving around the room for a couple of minutes.

These short bursts of activity can appear too small to matter.

After all, how much difference could a two-minute walk really make? On its own, perhaps not very much.

But repeated regularly across the day, these small periods of movement begin to change the overall pattern of your activity.

Instead of sitting almost continuously for eight or nine hours, you keep adding little bursts of gentle movement throughout the day.

And it seems that the accumulated effects of this regular movement could be pretty potent.

So why is moving regularly a good thing? One of the clearest potential benefits involves the way your body processes food.

After you eat carbohydrates are broken down into glucose which enters your bloodstream.

Your body releases insulin to help move that glucose into cells where it can be used or stored.

Now when you walk even at a gentle pace the muscles in your legs repeatedly contract and for that they need energy.

By making them work, you help them to take up that glucose from the bloodstream.

But if you stay sat down all day, those muscles are clearly inactive, which means they don't need energy and they don't need to pull glucose from your bloodstream.

Now, controlled studies have compared uninterrupted sitting with sitting that is regularly broken up by short periods of activity.

And across these studies, brief walking breaks have often reduced the rise in glucose and insulin following food, which is a good thing.

Now, this doesn't mean that a quick stroll cancels out an unhealthy diet or guarantees protection from type 2 diabetes.

Most of these experiments only last for a few hours or days, so they can't tell us exactly how a particular movement routine will affect someone's health over many years.

What they do show is that your body responds differently when sedentary time, time when you're sat motionless, is interrupted and that different response appears to be positive.