What is the '60' of the 90/60/20s of Office Injury Prevention?

Following up on the '90' of ergonomics being 90 degrees about posture (and how to set up the workstation around it to ensure this posture), '60' is about how much sitting to do.

More specifically, every 60 minutes take a 60 second break and take at least 60 steps. This ties into the 'How is sitting hurting you?' post last year. While body mechanics and posture factor in how bad sitting is for you, an almost as big issue is how your blood chemistry, and in particular, the hormones circulating in your blood, change with sitting.

There are those that think to themselves, 'I'm going to buckle down and get this work done. I can always go to the gym afterward to make up for it.' The problem with this is that the changes that happen with sitting too long are actually not reversed with exercise.

When you sit for too long your hormones start to change.

This is often referred to as 'Metabolic Syndrome'.

While it kicks in at different amounts of sitting for everyone (often around 2 hours is when the most significant increase happens), 1 hour of sitting is the generally accepted amount of sitting time before taking a break to stand and move around.

When standing and walking the body naturally has good posture (unless you've trained your body out of good posture with too much sitting). Usually, I recommend doing some light postural exercises for the neck and shoulders during this break to help retrain and maintain good posture. This combination has the added benefit of getting slowed blood flow moving again.

In the next post we can finish off with another type of break, the '20' of the 90/60/20s.