Check what sitting does to your hips
Breakfast, the commute, the desk, the evening ride, the sofa. The seats change. The shape your hips hold does not.
Put in the hours you spent in each seat on a normal training day. The numbers already there are a desk job with an evening ride.
Hips folded
12.5 h
Chances to stand up
25
One every half hour or so.
11 of those hours in a chair, more than 7. In one study, people who sat that long had less of the movement that swings the leg out behind you than active people who sat less. That is a link, not proof.
Two minutes on the floor
See what it took from your hips
Stand with your feet flat and lower yourself into a deep squat, heels down, as low as you can go. Stay there for a minute.
Lie on your back, hug one knee to your chest and let the other leg lie long. Then swap.
Where the numbers come from
People who sat for more than seven hours a day had less hip extension, the movement that swings the leg out behind you, than active people who sat less. (Boukabache, Preece and Brookes 2021) Across adults of all ages, it was the one movement the oldest group had lost more than a fifth of. (Roach and Miles 1991)
This is not about bad posture. The research does not find that a rounded back on its own causes pain. (Slater et al. 2019) The problem is holding one shape so often that the others go missing.
The thinking behind this is in the book: We built furniture that shortened us.
The app builds yoga into your training week, so you keep the range the day takes, and win some of it back.