The Winston Churchill Workout

I love it when my dear clients bring articles for me to read, knowing that I will enjoy them. Coleen brought this in for me. Having co-authored a book (Working on the Ball), I learned a lot about the negative impact of sitting for prolonged periods of time. Much of my energy coaching clients is put into undoing the negative effects on the body which include poor posture, tight muscles, obesity and other impacts from living a sedentary lifestyle.

The Globe and Mail published an article earlier this week titled "The Winston Churchill Workout". Here's a little excerpt.

Winston Churchill took to smoking cigars at age 20, appropriately enough in Cuba, during the Spanish-Cuban War in 1895. He never stopped. For the rest of his life, he smoked as religiously as he drank. When asked, toward the end of his life, to explain his longevity, he named the two vices he regarded more as rites. Smoke good cigars, he said, and drink fine brandy. He died at 90. Although British censors now airbrush his cigar from historic Second World War photographs, Churchill could yet become a posthumous model for healthy habits and long lives.

In his time, he was celebrated as much for his literary achievements – 77 volumes, thousands of speeches and essays – as for his statesmanship. (He won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1953.) Remarkably, using a wood lectern attached to a wall in his study at Chartwell, his beloved manor home in Kent, he wrote and dictated much of this work standing up, often striding about the room, as one historian put it, “in a cloud of cigar smoke.” He regarded writing as a physical as well as an intellectual exercise. But he frequently combined it with bricklaying and grounds work: “200 bricks and 200 words a day.”

Churchill’s example now appears relevant again because of the remarkable findings of James Levine, a medical researcher at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn. For the past five years, Dr. Levine has sought the answer to a simple question: Why do some people, who consume the same calories as other people and who exercise the same, gain more weight than those people? The answer, as revealed in a series of experiments using highly sensitive motion sensors to track subjects’ moment-by-moment movements: The people who didn’t put on weight moved more than the people who did.

I really don't sit still very much in my day. However, many of my clients sit all day. In fact, most people in Canada sit most of their day. Even though it may seem like a tall order, people really should be taking a break from their zombie screens every 20 minutes. You can't think as well when you sit for too long as well. Hello, circulation to the brain? Blood pools in our lower legs when we sit for prolonged periods. I could go on and on.

My great friend and co-author Sarah Robichaud, just got another book published in the US. Yay for her! Check out her book. Great ideas for getting more active at work without hitting the gym.
99 Things Women Wish They Knew Before - Getting Fit Without Hitting the Gym: Your guide to avoiding costly memberships with no results



Sitting still, in other words, is highly dangerous to your health. Your muscles instantly relax when you sit. Your calorie-burn rate falls (to one calorie a minute). Your risk of obesity rises. Your risk of death increases. Quoting other current research, Mr. Vlahos reports that men who sit for six hours a day, in their off-work hours, have a 20-per-cent higher risk of premature death than men who sit for three hours. For every incremental hour of TV-watching a day, people increase their risk of premature death by 11 per cent.