“Getting Ready for the Meals” – Mukul Chandra Dey

Growing up in India, the scene in the painting above was a familiar one.

My mother would sit on the floor in a deep squat, using a long-curved blade fixed to a small wooden platform, held down by her foot, to cut vegetables.

Many other kitchen tasks—kneading dough, grinding spices—were also done in a squat.

In The Chair, Galen Cranz shares how, in 1852, a British colonist in India was frustrated that local blacksmiths, carpenters, and masons squatted while working.

To him, this posture was a mark of cultural inferiority and tried his best to get his workers to adopt a more dignified way of working by using tables and chairs. And yet, research shows that squatting is far better for the body than sitting in a chair.

Why?

Cranz notes that researchers found that the physiological effects of performing tasks while squatting, even everyday ones like cooking, was aerobic — much to their surprise.

A  New York Times article focuses on a study about the Hadza, a hunter-gatherer tribe in Tanzania.

They are more physically active than us, but they also lounge about a lot during the day, much as we do. But how they do it is what makes the difference. The study found that they spend nearly 20% of their inactive time squatting.

In this position with their knees bent and their bottoms off the ground, their leg muscles remain engaged, contracting 40% as often as they do during walking.

Compare that to sitting in a chair, where our legs remain completely inert. We may not think much about what’s happening in our muscles while sitting, after all, we not doing any exercise then.

But the variation in muscular activity while squatting compared to when sitting in a chair might have big health implications — affecting cholesterol levels and other markers of cardiovascular problems.

We now know that prolonged chair-sitting isn’t just linked to stiffness and pain—it also increases the risk of heart disease, diabetes, and metabolic disorders.

Worse still, research suggests that even if you exercise regularly, the benefits of a morning workout can be undone by 10+ hours of sitting.

So, what can we do? I briefly entertained radical ideas—ripping out my kitchen counter, tossing out my chairs, even moving my family to Tanzania! But in reality, the solution is much simpler:

Make it a habit to stand up and move regularly. Ideally, every 30 minutes, but even once an hour can help. Set a reminder on your phone, walk to the water fountain, walk around the room, get your legs moving —anything to break up long periods of sitting.

This small action can lead to big health benefits. So why not try it right now?