Americans, on average, sit more than nine hours a day. All that inactivity correlates with higher blood pressure, blood sugar, and cholesterol, worse mental health and sleep, more pain, weaker muscles, and premature death. As a family medicine physician and medical weight loss specialist, Max Cohen RES’23, DO, spends much of each day encouraging patients to adopt healthy habits—especially to move more. While there’s no doubt our increasingly sedentary lifestyles are harmful, messages designed to scare us aren’t helpful, says the assistant professor of family medicine. “It’s not all doom and gloom,” he adds. 

It’s really difficult to suss out exactly how much death in the US is related to physical inactivity, or to compare smoking to sitting head-to-head—for example, is one cigarette equal to an hour of sitting? So it’s a bit of hyperbole, but the reality is that most adults are not meeting their expected physical activity guidelines, and there are a lot of good correlates that give the phrase some gravitas. 

People look at this as an unbeatable problem. They say, I’m just screwed. I have to sit all day for work. I don’t have time to go to the gym. I say to them, you really don’t have to. The difference in health benefit from doing absolutely nothing to doing something is huge. Walking is something you can do anywhere, to get your heart rate up, flex your muscles. Just 4,000 steps pull you out of a sedentary range so you start reaping some health benefits. And there’s no upper limit—the more you walk, the better. 

Frequent breaks throughout the day also help mitigate the effects of predominantly sitting. My patients like the term “exercise snacks” because it makes it palatable. The recommended 30 minutes of physical activity a day works out to, every hour, a couple of minutes of movement. Even a moderateto-vigorous six seconds of exercise has measurable health benefits. Can you do some jumping jacks for six seconds? Can you do some stairs for two minutes? If you’re doing that instead of watching TV on the couch, that’s a huge boost for overall health. I try to empower people with that information to say, you have so much to gain.