How To Not Be A Couch Potato?

How To Not Be A Couch Potato
1. Meet up with friends – When you finish a long shift in work, sometimes all you want is your comfiest pair of PJs and a bottle of wine in front of the telly. Rather than falling into that trap again and again, why not plan in advance and schedule in some catch-ups with your best pals.

Is it OK to be a couch potato sometimes?

A man sitting on a couch watching TV. Getty Images If you usually spend many hours sitting down for work or leisure, you are likely spending even more time on your bum during the pandemic. And as your legs turn numb and your posture crumbles, a little voice in your head might be screaming to get up and exercise.

But research has some good news for chair connoisseurs. Although physical activity is low, a new study found some people who live sedentary lifestyles either by choice or default are actually getting a workout of sorts — in their brains. Researchers from Colorado State University found that older adults who spent the majority of their time sitting performed better on knowledge-based activities such as vocabulary, reading comprehension and reasoning tasks.

That’s because when people sit down for long hours at a time, they are likely engaging in educational activities that stimulate the brain, such as reading and doing puzzles, the study says. The findings suggest the couch potato lifestyle isn’t all that bad, as long as baseline exercise is done from time to time.

The study was published in September in the journal Psychology and Aging. “There’s this big push within health and wellness that sitting is always bad for your body, that being a couch potato is not good,” study lead author Aga Burzynska, an assistant professor in the Colorado State University department of human development and family studies, said in a news release this month.

“Although our earlier studies indicated that the brains of those who spend more time sitting may age faster, it seems that on the cognitive level, sitting time may also be meaningful.” Past research has shown that increased exercise improves cardiovascular and metabolic health, but the tie between daily physical activity and cognitive health is more blurry — “especially in older adults,” Burzynska said.

“We know that as we grow older, even if we do not have any cognitive impairments, people aged 60 and up already show some decreases in speed, executive functioning, and memory,” she said. “Those decreases are totally within a normal range, but this study was looking to understand how our behaviors and habits may correlate with cognitive outcomes in older age.” Previous studies have also depended on self-reported data to measure activity, which can be overestimated.

Instead, the new study involved 228 healthy adults between the ages of 60 and 80 wearing sensors on their hips for seven days to measure daily time spent sitting or doing activity of any intensity, according to the researchers. Participants also had to complete 16 cognitive tests that involved selecting patterns, filling in blanks, identifying shapes and other tasks.

Which person is called a couch potato?

Definition of couch potato : a lazy and inactive person especially : one who spends a great deal of time watching television.

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What activities does a couch potato typically do?

My life has always been full of movement. As a fitness coach and former owner of a personal training business, I know the importance of being active throughout the day and have never been concerned about my activity level. Even with many of my working hours spent at a desk, I make sure to take several breaks from my desk throughout the day, walk up and down the stairs of my colonial home often, and when the dog begs to be walked, I often comply.

You can imagine my shock, then, when the pedometer built into my new iPhone 6 showed me how often I was not meeting the recommended 10,000 steps a day. If a wellness professional like myself struggles to get in enough daily steps, how do the rest of you do it? Is it possible to accumulate 10,000 steps a day, especially while eight hours of most days are spent working? More importantly, does it really matter? If we’re getting to the gym most days of the week, isn’t that enough to protect our health, even if we fall short on the step counter? Curiosity turned to alarm when I began noticing several research articles in my professional journals stating that excessive periods of sedentary behavior can be detrimental to one’s health, independent of achieving the recommended amounts of daily physical activity.

It seems that despite an increase in individuals exercising, we have become a nation of couch potatoes! Even if you rarely sit on your couch in front of the TV, there is still a good chance you have little accumulated movement throughout the course of the day aside from visits to the gym.

There’s even a new term for this phenomenon: the Active Couch Potato, Sedentary behavior refers to prolonged sitting, lying or reclining quietly, or engaging in any activity that requires little or no muscle movement. When we look at how most of us spend our days as compared to past generations, it is apparent how a steady decrease in daily movement has happened.

Generally speaking, most people spend significantly more time in cars and sitting in traffic than in years past. We participate in more home-based entertainment such as television, Netflix, video games, online shopping and browsing social media sites.

Our jobs require little if any physical exertion. Modern conveniences such as automatic garage door openers, remote controls, kitchen appliances, electronic lawn mowers, and even robotic vacuum cleaners, allow us to minimize movement to get chores done. Children are also moving less than in the past as schools cut back on the allocated time for physical education and recess.

It’s no wonder we have an obesity epidemic in this country! Furthermore, the risks of this sedentary lifestyle go far beyond weight gain. Researchers are discovering that sedentary behavior increases our risk for many diseases and early death. Sitting on our behinds all day increases the risk of cardiovascular disease, metabolic disorders, high blood pressure, diabetes, and possibly colon, breast and endometrial cancers.

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What happens to your body when you are a couch potato?

Highlights –

Prolonged sitting can increase the risk of cardiovascular disease Take a small break after every 30 minutes of continuous sitting Exercise for at least 30 minutes each day to stay fit

Do you sit for long hours? A sedentary lifestyle is harmful to your health in more ways than one. According to WHO, a sedentary lifestyle increases the risk of chronic conditions including cardiovascular diseases, diabetes, obesity, hypertension and more.

  1. It can also affect your mental health and increase the risk of depression and anxiety.
  2. Not moving enough also leads to weight gain which is also a risk factor for several diseases.
  3. It is often advised to maintain optimum levels of physical activity throughout the day.
  4. One of the common misconceptions is that if you are working out every morning is enough to counter the side effects of a sedentary lifestyle.

Someone following this routine is know as an active couch potato. Keep reading to know all about this.

How many people are couch potatoes?

Phys Ed – Gretchen Reynolds on the science of fitness. The study was widely publicized, especially after the BBC used its findings to develop a diverting online tool that lets users compare their biomass to that of people in other nations. (I learned that I have the B.M.I.

  1. Of your average, middle-aged Eritrean.) The study, however, did not address possible underlying causes of the ever-growing weight of nations.
  2. But a group of groundbreaking new reports, being published online as a series today in The Lancet, suggest that voluntary physical inactivity, a practice once confined mostly to North America and parts of Europe, is spreading rapidly to the rest of the world and likely contributing materially to global gains in tonnage and declines in health.

Consider the findings of perhaps the most sobering of the new studies, which looked at the extent to which sedentary lifestyles are colonizing the world. Led by Pedro C. Hallal, a professor at the Federal University of Pelotas in Brazil, the researchers turned to a large body of data about activity that the W.H.O.

  • Has been collecting in recent years.
  • To gather the data, the W.H.O.
  • Provides questionnaires to people in various nations that ask, in effect, how much they exercise and otherwise move in their daily lives, an admittedly inexact way to measure activity (people misremember or, for cultural or other reasons, prevaricate).

But it’s the best global information currently available. The latest figures suggest that the world’s population has become disturbingly inactive. According to the researchers’ calculations, 31.1 percent of the world’s adults, or about 1.5 billion people, are almost completely sedentary, meaning that they do not meet the minimum recommendation of 150 minutes of walking or other moderate activity per week, or about 20 minutes a day.

  1. Teenagers are faring even worse.
  2. More than 80 percent of young people ages 13 to 15 worldwide are not getting the hour a day of vigorous exercise recommended for their age group.
  3. Unsurprisingly, North America and Europe lead the world in not exercising, with 43.3 percent of Americans and 34.8 percent of Europeans not reaching the low recommended threshold.
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But the world is catching up or, rather, joining us in sitting down. More than 30 percent of Russians are inactive nowadays; ditto in the Middle East; and about 27 percent of Africans are sedentary. (Although in general, the richer the nation, the less active it is, the most sedentary nation on Earth is the tiny island of Malta, population 419,000, 72 percent of whom almost never voluntarily move around much.) The consequences for global and personal health are punishing and likely to grow more so, reports another first-of-its-kind study in the Lancet series,

Are you a mouse potato?

What Does Mouse Potato Mean? – Mouse potato is a term for someone who spends a lot of leisure time or discretionary time sitting in front of a screen connected to the Internet. It is a modern take on the older term “couch potato,” that refers to someone who spends a lot of time in front of a television.

What is a homebody?

A person who prefers pleasures and activities that center around the home ; stay-at-home.

What do you call a person who watches a lot of television and hardly exercise?

A ‘ couch potato ‘ is a person who watches a lot of television and does not have an active life.

How can I get fit in a month?

– If you are new to exercise, or coming off a long break, Shapiro suggests that you start with a cardiovascular program. Run or jog 20 to 30 minutes every other day. You can also do other moderate-intensity activities like walking briskly, swimming, or bicycling.

After your cardio workout, do three to four sets of bodyweight exercises like squats, pushups, lunges, burpees, or Russian twists. “You will need a day of rest between these kinds of days,” said Shapiro, “but you can stay active by taking up yoga to reduce stress, increase blood flow, and work on your flexibility.” After that, slowly add in strength training.

This will boost your metabolism and help burn more fat and calories. If you have access to a gym, Shapiro suggests doing three to four sets of strength exercises, with 12 to 16 repetitions per set. This can include movements like chest presses, lat pulldowns, rows, and leg presses.

What is an active couch potato?

Simply put, ‘Active Couch Potato’ describes someone who meets the recommendations for physical activity but still sits around for long periods of the day.

Which refers to a couch potato with no or irregular physical activity?

Sedentary lifestyle. A sedentary lifestyle is a type of lifestyle with no or irregular physical activity. A person who lives a sedentary lifestyle may colloquially be known as a couch potato. It is commonly found in both the developed and developing world.

How do you play couch potato?

Players get a hand of five cards, either objects or special ‘Goof Proof’ cards. The game owner selects a channel to watch on television, and when the commercials come on, players race to either find their own objects, or the objects of other players’ face up cards so as to block them.