UrbanUpdate

Go to the gym all you want. But the evidence is mounting that even the most herculean workouts won't save you from a sedentary day at the office. (We're talking heart attacks, persistent pudginess, even, um, rectal cancer.) Here's how to emancipate yourself from your desk chair—and live a lot longer.

In the annals of science, the correlation between sitting on your ass for a living and having generally poor health is unlikely to be recalled as a great breakthrough. And yet a recent report saying essentially just that landed on the front page of The New York Times and sparked a conflagration of similar stories around the world, prompting newscasters to report, from their rollie chairs, that we might be sitting ourselves to death on the job.

The deal is this: Scientists at the Pennington Biomedical Research Center, a Louisiana-based research facility that focuses on all things related to fat-assed-ness, linked America's obesity epidemic to a precipitous loss of "active" jobs—any vocations that require you to move more than your fingers and eyeballs. Their methodology was simple. The team, led by Timothy Church, M.D., assigned intensity values to various jobs and, using employment data beginning in 1960, watched as those labeled "moderate intensity" (farming, making stuff) plummeted while sedentary jobs (mine, yours) skyrocketed. They figured that the average American man now burns 140 fewer calories per workday than his farming and factory-working forebears, and then asked a mathematician to figure out how this would translate into weight gain. And whaddya know? The resulting estimate was nearly identical to the average weight Americans actually gained over the same period.

In effect, the work of Church and his crew—subsequently linked to a growing body of data about the hazards of sedentary life—helped expose a potentially huge scientific blind spot. For years we've assumed that as long as we meet the basic requirements for ercise (twenty minutes a day, three times a week), we'd be fine. But here's the problem: In the past two decades or so, the overall level of ercise among Americans hasn't really changed, while our waistlines have ballooned. Many scientists explained this collective inflation of our pleated trousers by looking at our diet—Big Macs and Big Gulps—but Church's group introduced a new and scary possibility: The doughy roll around your middle has as much or more to do with what we're doing, or not doing, at work.

We were warned that this could be a problem. The first study on workplace torpidity appeared back in 1953, when a Scottish scientist named Jerry Morris showed that bus conductors, who moved around a lot, had fewer heart attacks than the drivers, who sat all day. Drivers, he found, had noticeably higher rates of heart disease than conductors, despite coming from the same social class and otherwise leading the same kinds of lives. They were twice as likely to die of a heart attack.

When I traveled to meet Church and his colleagues at Pennington, a campus of low-slung tan buildings populated by hundreds of people in lab coats, epidemiologist Peter Katzmarzyk clarified Morris's work. The Scotsman was indeed ahead of his time; he just didn't fully understand his results. It wasn't merely the activity of the conductors that made them healthy but the inactivity of the drivers that made them unhealthy. In other words, much in the same way that running 10Ks won't save a smoker from lung cancer, going to the gym isn't going to save you from your desk job.

Three guys (you may have heard of them) who don't sit on their asses all day

Donald Rumsfeld

"I've used a stand-up desk steadily since 1969. I have one at home and one at the office. I don't know about any health benefits; I just get more done standing up. It works. Oh, and when folks drop by the office to raise a question, if you're standing up, the meetings tend to be shorter."

Rep. Aaron Schock (R-Ill.)

"They should call it sitting—not running—for office. So I make a concerted effort to make my duties as active as possible. In parades, I'm always running up and down. I don't fight for the front parking spot—I park in the middle and walk in. I'll get up and talk to my employees at their desks. None of those things alone are the solution, but it all adds up."

Mikhail Prokhorov, Nets Owner

"I don't use a computer, but that doesn't mean I'm not stuck at my desk. So I have a little gym in my office, and when I have time, I kickbox. I move just to keep the blood flowing. I also ask my colleagues to train with me. We do martial arts."

The root of the problem, Katzmarzyk told me, is that our body is based on a blueprint drawn up in a world before desk chairs: "If you think about our hunter-gatherer existence, the whole drive was to capture as much energy from the environment with as little effort as possible." If early man chased a chipmunk for two hours, the resulting calories wouldn't make up for those burned in the process. To compensate, he got smart. He built traps. Conserving energy, Katzmarzyk says, "is what our physiology is designed for. We're still very efficient. We're designed to store energy." Which, because we don't expend as much of it anymore, is one reason we're fat.

According to Katzmarzyk, our metabolism was optimized for our Stone Age ancestors, who had to stalk and kill (or at least forage) for lunch. We modern men need only dispatch an assistant to meet the Quiznos guy in the lobby—we have to work (much) less hard to find (much) more abundant food. Scientists use the term "energy efficiency ratio" to measure this calories-in, calories-out relationship, and it's been calculated that today's human acquires 50 percent more food per calorie burned.

For an accelerated example of what happens to us as we go from active to sedentary, scientists observed Inuits in northern Canada from 1970 to 1990 and saw remarkable deterioration in physical conditioning as they stopped hunting seals and started eating Cheetos. Closer to home, Ye Olde Amish have stubbornly stuck to tradition. The average Amish man takes upwards of 18,000 steps a day. Those of us chained to desks are lucky to top 5,000.

In theory, I shouldn't have this problem. As a self-employed writer with no set hours or boss to answer to, I should be moving around plenty. But it turns out I'm not. For the past year, I've been writing a book, and my schedule has been much closer to the one America's office workers live by. Most days I rise, eat, take the subway a few stops, walk a couple of blocks, and sit at a desk for eight to ten hours. The only thing that might be exceptional about my case is that I am borderline compulsive about drinking water, so I probably make more trips to the bathroom than the average guy.

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This is actually a great (accidental) strategy, according to Catrine Tudor-Locke, director of the Walking Behavior Laboratory at Pennington. Tudor-Locke is one of the world's foremost evangelists for walking, and it was inevitable that I would arrive at her office to find her at a "walking desk"—basically a desk mated to a treadmill. Tudor-Locke's is a fancy ($6,000) Steelcase model, but she said that a co-worker built his own using a cheap treadmill and some Target shelving.

Let's liaise on the climbing wall: The most active offices

TIMBERLAND

A soccer field, Zumba classes, canoes and kayaks upon request—Timberland's campus is like a fitness lab where work occasionally gets done. "We're an outdoors company, and our employees are sort of hardwired to get moving," says CEO Jeff Swartz.

SAS

Software CEO Jim Goodnight sounds vaguely Orwellian when explaining his company's investment in a 66,000-square- foot fitness facility: "We know our employees are more productive and creative when they're healthy, energized, and feel good." Well, no one here is complaining: 96 percent of SAS employees use the jumbo gym.

NEW BELGIUM BREWERY

After a year at New Belgium, every employee is given a cruiser bike to explore the fifty-acre campus's dirt tracks. "Some of our best ideas happen on rides," says CEO Kim Jordan. For the other big breakthroughs, check over at the climbing wall.

—Rafi Kohan

Tudor-Locke stepped down and told me to give the desk a try. "It starts at about 0.3 miles an hour," she said. "Now take it up to one mile an hour and see how that feels. Then go ahead and type. Now take it up to two, which is where my world is." I typed some lines; it was no harder than if I were sitting. "You can type without looking," she said. "That's good." People who have to look at the keyboard have trouble. In total, Tudor-Locke walks about three hours—which at two miles per hour means that she walks six miles a day. With help from an in-house ercise lab, she found that she burns about 2,000 calories more per week than she would have sitting in her chair.

As a walking specialist, Tudor-Locke believes the metric that matters most is total steps taken. When she added the walking desk to an already active lifestyle ("like, scary active"), she was peaking at more than 28,000 steps a day. In comparison, she said, office workers are probably under 5,000, with the most sedentary among us in the realm of 3,500. These were just guesses, she said, because the whole area of study is very new. The truth could be worse. (When I strapped on a pedometer, the results were depressing: On days when I drove to my office, I averaged about 3,000 steps; when I took the train, it jumped to 4,000 a day.)

I asked if Tudor-Locke had a chair I might pull up to continue our interview, and she gave me a look as if I'd just suggested we take golf carts next door for stuffed-crust pizza. Instead, she led me into the swampy afternoon, where she set a swift pace as we conducted a "walking meeting," a favorite conceit of hers.

Americans, Tudor-Locke said, are the world leaders in not walking. By looking at a national study of Americans who wore pedometers with accelerometers—which show cadences—Tudor-Locke could tell how much time people spend walking, running, sitting, or "puttering around." In many cases, she said, "it is very clear that the individual's highest single minute in the morning is when he's walking from his car to the office." The next spike, then, is "at the end of the day when he walks from his office to the car." This pattern appears "again and again."

Tudor-Locke and Church suspect the minimum steps we should take a day is in the neighborhood of 8,000. For the guy who's strolling only to and from his car, that's a lot of extra walking: One hundred steps a minute (a reasonable pace) is 1,000 in ten minutes, so to get to 8,000 from 3,000 you're talking fifty more minutes of walking. Even I don't drink that much water.

Not surprisingly, evidence shows that individuals who are more active—again, think Amish—have a lower risk of heart disease and diabetes. (One recent study even connected prolonged sitting to colorectal cancer.) And scientists are looking beyond just walking to measure something called non-ercise activity thermogenesis (or NEAT)—the energy expended during daily living. As Church told me, "Don't underestimate the benefits of low-intensity activity."

"It's just fundamental thermodynamics—energy in and energy out," Tudor-Locke said as we went indoors for our cooldown laps. "I'm not going to advocate that we go back to banging our clothing on rocks. I like my washing machine. But there is such a thing as excessive sloth." After four laps, Tudor-Locke finally stopped walking.

"It's one of those things I never get tired of saying: Just walk more."

Talk about setting the bar low. All that's required of us, to save ourselves from an expanding paunch brought on by excessive e-mailing, is to get up and move. And our waistlines aren't the only thing to worry about. "Just as weight has gone up, flexibility, functional strength, and muscle mass have likely decreased over the last five decades with the loss of active jobs," Church says. This means that even if sitting doesn't give you heart disease, it will most likely foil any fantasies you may have of a twilight inspired by Cocoon. You see, while modern medicine is doing a good job of phasing out premature death, "it cannot assure a high quality of life." According to Church, we lose 1 percent of muscle mass per year starting sometime in our forties or fifties, and the loss of physically active jobs likely accelerates this. "If you do not have enough strength to chase your grandchildren or lift yourself off the toilet," he says, "then your quality of life will not be great."

And those are just the physical ramifications. It seems obvious that all these inactive days in climate-controlled rooms are bumming us out as well. The satisfaction of completing a market analysis can hardly compare to the feeling of finishing up a house foundation. Church says that looking at how mental well-being correlates to your activity at work is one of many related studies he'd like to do, given the time (and funding); existing research shows that physical activity relieves depression. "I jokingly say that the strongest benefits of physical activity are above the shoulders," he told me. "You just feel good when you go cut wood; I mean, you really do. Mow the damn lawn! You'll feel better afterward."

_Josh Dean recently logged 18,564 steps while walking his son to sleep. _

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