Sit much? Even if you exercise, your risk of heart disease and stroke are higher because of the time you spend in that chair.

A new advisory from the American Heart Association says we have to get up and move more than we do.

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“We spend a lot more time sitting behind computers than we used to. Movement is being engineered out of our lives, and the best advice is we need to sit less and move more,” said Deborah Rohm Young, Ph.D., chair of the panel that wrote the new advisory published in the American Heart Association journal Circulation, in a statement on the organization’s website.

Young, director of behavioral research at Kaiser Permanente Southern California, worked alongside a team of experts to examine the best research on sedentary behavior. Their work shows that prolonged sedentary time is bad for the heart and blood vessels regardless of how much physical activity one gets.

“If you’re already physically active, that’s the most important thing. But it’s good to take breaks from sedentary time, too,” Young said. “Instead of powering through your work from the minute you get into the office until lunch break, consider walking around the office a couple of times.”

American adults, the AHA said, currently spend an estimated six to eight hours a day doing nothing but sitting — that includes driving, reading, TV viewing, working on the computer and otherwise having screen time. And that is a conservative estimate, according to Marc Hamilton, Ph.D., author of several studies on sedentary behavior and a professor at the University of Houston. His research shows that adults spend more than nine hours a day being sedentary.

“Our bodies were built to move all day. They weren’t built to be idle and stationary with a metabolic rate similar to a person in a coma,” said one researcher.

“Our bodies were built to move all day,” he told the AHA. “They weren’t built to be idle and stationary with a metabolic rate similar to a person in a coma. When we’re depriving ourselves of that kind of essential muscular activity throughout the day, very potent things happen inside our bodies. You can’t impact those same cellular processes by going to a gym and doing artificial exercises for 30 minutes.”

Related: Get Moving, or Get Busy Dying

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Young is not only challenging all of us to move — he’s also challenging researchers in the field of physical activity to expand and consider a new field of research on sedentary behavior.

The new advisory recommends 30 minutes or so of moderate to vigorous exercise each day to meet the AHA’s weekly recommendation of 150 minutes of moderate exercise or 75 minutes of vigorous exercise — and for physicians to stress the importance of physical activity.

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