Preventing Exercise Resistance With Sedentary Interruptions

The World Health Organisation recently published guidelines with physical activity recommendations that serve to promote healthy lifestyles and thus can help reduce the risk of chronic diseases. In these, they also included for the first time that sedentary behaviour (e.g. sedentary work, driving a car, ...) should be reduced as much as possible since there are clear links between a sedentary lifestyle and negative health effects.

However, WHO also indicates that more research is needed to investigate the health effects of interactions between planned physical activity and sedentary behaviour. This is of even greater importance as there are now some studies indicating that the acute effects of an exercise session are greatly reduced when combined with prolonged sitting throughout the day. This new insight has been labelled as sitting-induced exercise resistance. This study aims to investigate whether it is possible to reduce sitting behaviour by moving more and optimally preserve the effects of a training session.

This study will evaluate how the combination of sitting behaviour and a training session affects certain health parameters. Indeed, prolonged sitting leads to an increased risk of poor cardiometabolic health and consequently an increased risk of developing conditions such as diabetes and cardiovascular disease. Recent research shows that interrupting prolonged sitting can largely prevent some adverse effects on cardiometabolic health. Furthermore, it also shows that the positive effects of an exercise session are greatly reduced when this workout is scheduled on a day that was otherwise spent mainly sitting.

Previous research shows that interrupting sitting behaviour after 20 minutes by short-term (2min) exercise at light intensity would be optimal to improve glucose metabolism. However, this pattern is not very practical to apply in a work environment. For this, installing sit-stand desks could be a solution, as it seems that introducing such sit-stand desks in a work environment could cost-effectively reduce the risk of developing a number of chronic diseases by reducing sitting time. In this study, the effects on postprandial lipemia of reducing prolonged sitting time by introducing sit-stand desks and an exercise bout will be evaluated.