Chances are you’re reading this while you’re sitting down. After all, Australians, on average, spend 15 hours a day sitting down, according to fresh Australian Heart Foundation research.  And kids? An average of seven hours a day.

Sitting too much can increase our risk of developing heart disease by as much as 50 percent – and  that’s even if you’re doing a decent amount of exercise elsewhere in your day!

The bottom line is, no matter how active you are, sitting less is vital.

“Movement is medicine,” Exercise Physiologist Lorraine Barwick says.  It starts with sitting less, standing more, and moving more – each and every hour of your day, she explains.  “Just try to get up and move around more each hour, no matter where you are.”

Lorraine’s background is in cardiac rehabilitation – she uses exercise to prescribe good health, and while she endorses the government recommendations for ‘30 minutes exercise most days’ she says “But if you sit too much, what’s the point?”

She has plenty of tips and tricks for building some exercise-fun into even our big ‘desk-days’.  “it only takes 60 – 90 seconds standing up for the impact to begin – think about standing up as a light switch”, she says.

Our lives have changed and we have so many labour-saving devices doing the work that used to be done by hand and foot.

Like anything we want to achieve, it is about the small changes throughout the day, Or as Lorraine so aptly puts  it “If nothing changes, nothing changes,”

Sources: I attended Lorraine’s workshop at Coolum in July 2015. For Lorraine’s tips and tricks visit www.standuphealth.com/.  Also, here’s the link to my my previous article about how standing nurtures the brain.