MOVING MORE, TOGETHER
Doctors sometimes call it "the new smoking": sitting still for most of the day. Around the world, one adult in three and four teenagers in five do not get the amount of exercise that doctors recommend. The price is high. People who rarely move are more likely to suffer from heart disease and depression, and every year the treatment of their illnesses costs health systems billions of dollars.(lines 1–5)
Many employers have decided that they cannot wait for their workers to change on their own. Offices now come with standing desks, bicycle parking and free yoga classes at lunchtime, in the hope of keeping staff alert1 and reducing the number of days they take off sick. In Sweden and Finland, companies can even pay for their employees' gym and sports activities without paying any extra tax. Laura Benson, who studies workplace health at Northvale University, welcomes these efforts but doubts that they reach the right people. "The yoga class fills up with the same sporty people every week," she says. "The colleagues who need it most are the ones who never sign up."(lines 6–12)
Technology was supposed to solve this problem. Millions of people have downloaded fitness apps that try to get them out of their chairs – for example, by sending a reminder after an hour of sitting. Yet most users stop opening these apps within a month. Benson is not surprised. "An app has no feelings, so you don't feel guilty when you ignore it," she explains. "After a while, its messages become just background2 noise."(lines 13–17)
A research team at Northvale University recently set out to discover whether colleagues could succeed where apps had failed. Six hundred office workers were each given a step counter to wear on the wrist3. Half of them were placed in teams of five, and every morning a screen next to the office coffee machine showed how many steps each team member had taken the day before. The other half wore the same devices, but nobody except the workers themselves ever saw their numbers. The researchers followed both groups for six months and recorded the daily steps of every single worker taking part, at weekends as well as on workdays.(lines 18–24)
By the end, team members were walking about 2,000 more steps a day than the others, and very few of them had given up. "Letting yourself down is easy, but letting down four colleagues is much harder," says Benson, who was not involved in the study. She thinks this could matter for decades. "If people keep moving together, they might avoid many of the illnesses that come with age, and they might even enjoy their working day more."(lines 25–29)