published 6/4/02, updated 6/26/04

The Still Life

The trouble with a lifestyle of inactivity

by Paul Ingraham, Vancouver, Canada MORE
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Credentials and qualifications

I am a writer and retired Registered Massage Therapist (unusually well-trained for a massage therapist, a 3000-hour program). I’m almost done with a Bachelor of Health Sciences degree. I am a peer reviewer for The Natural Standard, and a copyeditor for Science-Based Medicine. My most important qualification is more than a decade of workaholic post-graduate study, clinical experience, and constant conversations with readers from around the world, including many experts who have provided countless suggestions and criticisms.

For more information, see: Who Am I to Say? More information about my qualifications, credentials and professional experiences for my readers and customers.

We are sedentary. Everything our great grandparents did was more work. The population of agricultural workers is less than a third what it was fifty years ago, let alone a hundred years ago.1 The most trivial tasks required more physical effort then than now, and most things that are hard work have been automated: transportation, agriculture, manufacturing. The age of information has created legions of workers who literally only lift their fingers for eight hours every day.

Fitness isn’t enough

We have become a physically soft people, and fitness crazes aren’t enough to stem the tide. An old friend of my family’s has been an outdoorsman for his whole life. He’s one of those people who doesn’t just go camping, he “goes into the bush” for a while. He tells me that he’s seen a trend in his Outward Bound students, even the ones who are superbly gym-fit:

“They’re wimps,” he says. “Pure and simple. Put them on a mountainside, they’re whipped in a few hours, if not a few minutes. I can go for days, forever practically. They ask me, ‘Aren’t you tired yet?’ I never am.”

They’re wimps,” he says. “Pure and simple.”

In the science fiction classic, Ringworld, Larry Niven paints a future full of frail, sensitive people. Pain and effort are virtually eliminated, and fitness and pain tolerance along with them. But so what? It’s no great loss, as long as no one has to do any physical work or suffer. Right?

But we may underestimate the severity of the problem.

The cost of a cozy life

Several NASA research projects have shown that chronic inactivity causes marked degeneration of virtually every measurement of physical fitness. An ominous example is the impairment of the reflexes that help us maintain good posture. Damage like this isn’t irreversible in theory, but it is in practice: the longer we slouch, the harder it gets to sit upright — literally. A downward spiral.2

I suspect that people are suffering from a lot more musculoskeletal aches and pains than they used to. Modern statistics are not hard to come by: for instance, “back pain is the second leading cause of absenteeism from work, after the common cold”.3 But has it always been that way?

Don’t try this at home

This is a true story, as far as I know: an aging farmer fell off a ladder and hurt his back. He refused to be taken to the doctor. “Not necessary,” he insisted. “Haven’t been to a doctor in thirty years, and I ain’t starting now!” But he was too crippled to resist, and his children took him to get help. The doctors soon discovered that he had broken his back — but not for the first time. He had, in fact, fractured his back twice previously, and healed, without ever getting help.

An anecdote like that is no basis for drawing a conclusion, but it does strongly suggest a question: are hard-working people really tougher? A lot tougher? Are we sedentary folk a lot more prone to injuries and complications? When you ask the question like that, it’s hard to believe that we aren’t. But the researchers will have to settle it.

Meanwhile, I can tell you that I certainly see a lot of pathology in my massage therapy practice that can’t be explained any other way. So I’m going to keep encouraging people to be as active as possible: use it or lose it is a very basic biological principle. We ignore it at our peril.

Chop wood, carry water!

Notes

Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, visited June 4, 2002, www.fao.org. Return to text.
Livingston, RB. Psychological and neuromuscular problems arising from prolonged inactivity. New York Academy of Science, 1967. Return to text.
American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons, visited June 4, 2002, www.aaos.org. Return to text.