When not sleeping your body was designed to be almost continually active. Immobolize a limb for just three hours and its starts to degenerate. Thats why even durning sleep you automatically flex and stretch and turn more than a hundred times at night. DISUSE IS DEADLY.
A colleague of mine did some research and reviewed over 100 studies showing that the sedentary lifestyle developed in the last 50 years in America causes widespread bodily damage. This damage occurs independently of other health risk factors, such as smoking, alcohol, fat, age, and family history of disease. Here are a few of my findings..
By itself, simple inactivity causes a chain reaction of cardiovascular decay. First, it reduces vital capacity. That is, sitting like a slug reduces your ability to take up and use oxygen. So muscles, organs, and brain become partially oxygen deprived. Second, inactivity reduces cardiac output, that is the ability of your heart to pump blood around the body. So the tissues of couch potatoes become doubly deprived. They get less oxygen and they get less blood and the essential nutrients blood contains.
In an effort to make up these deficits, your body constricts arteries, thereby raising blood pressure. This arterial construction on top of a weakened heart not only increases the risks of clots and stroke, but also makes your cardiovascular system less able to respond to sudden movement or changes of position. Consequently, sedentary folk often suffer dizziness on standing, because the impaired system cannot instantly increase blood flow to the brain. With any sudden movement thet are prone to falls and accidents, because the restricted system of blood flow cannot repond efficiently.
One of the most interesting studies shows that more sedentary people than active people are hit and killed in traffic accidents. No it's not because a gang of crazed motorists hunts them down. It's because their weakened cardiovascular system makes them incapable of performing the nimble moves required to avoid oncoming traffic, without becoming dizzy and staggering or falling in the process. So when someone tells you that couch potatoes run mega-risks of being creamed by a truck - you better believe it.
Inactivity also increases levels of cholesterol and triglycerides. Triglycerides are the fats you store, and we have already. Bones also thin and weaken because your skeleton resistance requires continuous resistance exercise in order to grow new bone matrix. A combination of inactivity and poor bone nutrition is the major cause of the epidemic of osteosporosis now burdening America- another-man-made-and entirely preventable disease.
Inactivity also disrupts bowel function and disorders glucose metabolism independently of whatever food you eat. The near epidemics of intestinal disorders and adult-onset diabetes in America bear mute testimony to our slug lifestyle. Sex hormone levels also decline with inactivity, now linked to the huge increase in impotence in America.