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 You can burn up to 350 calories a day by changing how you sit.
Office workers face a real problem getting more physical activity into their daily lives. They spend hour after hour sitting at a desk. What if you could turn sitting into exercise that could burn up to 350 calories a day? Sounds good, doesn’t it? Sitting can be made to burn calories by using an exercise ball as your desk chair instead of a more traditional chair. In fact, as I am writing this sentence, I am sitting on an exercise ball instead of a regular chair. The reason why using an exercise ball burns calories gets back to The NEAT Threat, which showed us how the little bits of unconscious fidgeting we do all day adds up to big calorie burns. Sitting on an exercise ball burns calories because it is an unstable surface. The ball is round and mushy so you sink into it a little. You can’t stay in one place without constantly using your muscles to keep balanced on top of the ball. That’s why sitting on an exercise ball is called active sitting. You are actively engaging your abdominal and back muscles to keep balanced. Contrast active sitting to a traditional chair where you sit passively. The chair completely supports you and you need very little effort to sit. With active sitting you aren’t even aware you are burning calories, it’s just a side effect of trying to stay balanced on the ball. Exercise balls aren’t for everyone. They take a bit of getting used to at first. They can also be tiring because you use a lot of muscle power to stabilize the ball. Start using your exercise ball as a chair in short chunks of time, slowly building up to using it all day. Don’t think exercise balls are just for work. You can use them everywhere. We have used exercise balls as chairs on our deck and for chairs at our dinner table. You could even have a house rule saying you can only watch TV while sitting on an exercise ball. Such a policy transforms passive TV viewing into a calorie burning exercise! To Learn More · FitterFirst at http://www.fitter1.com is a quality supplier of exercise balls and other balance equipment. |
