If your daily stints at the gym have you feeling virtuous, this may come as something of a downer: A session on the treadmill or stair machine won’t undo the damage caused by that sedentary day job. That’s according to recent Australian research published in the April edition of Diabetes Care, which found that sitting there, hour after hour, is bad, bad, bad on your system.

There is some glimmer of hope for the desk-bound. The same research found that those who took frequent breaks from sitting reduced their girth and their body mass indexes, and lowered glucose and triglyceride levels in their blood streams.

According to the study, it doesn’t matter how much exercise you get; unless you also break up your sitting time, your body will suffer.

On reading this research, I felt a sense of impending doom. I sit down in front of the computer and that’s it - I’m absorbed for hours. In the days when I used to do computer programming, I’d even forget about going to the loo. I’m not quite as lost to the screen these days, but sedentary is certainly an apt description of me at work.

Stretch Break 

Enter Stretch Break. Stretch Break is a program which gives you a gentle nudge every now and then, reminding you to take a break. At an interval you determine, it pops up a break reminder and, unless you tell it to leave you alone, displays a series of gentle, yoga-ish exercises you can perform at your desk.

Stretch Break is flexible. As well as determining how often it should interrupt your work, you can choose the number of stretches for each session or even choose a particular sub-set of stretches to use. The latter is particularly useful when it comes to breaking up your sedentary time: by selecting the standing stretches, you can make sure you heave your frame out of your chair whenever Stretch Break pops up. Stretch Break also displays “ergo reminders” at the end of each break, little hints that will keep your body ticking along more happily.

I’ve been using Stretch Break on and off for years. It’s currently up to version 6.2 and I think the first version I used was 2.something. My problem is that it’s hard to commit to using the program. For the first few days after I’ve installed it, I use it religiously. But then, inevitably, comes the time when it will pop up while I’m in the middle of something intense, and I’ll think “Not now!” and hit the Later button. I promise myself I’ll take a break when the next reminder appears, but I know I’m already on the slippery slope to uninstalling it.

Stretch Break tries to accommodate busy or recalcitrant users by offering to delay the session for a minute or even five minutes. Once you start hitting those Later buttons regularly, you’re probably doomed.

So I’ve decided that what I need is the gentle inducement of Stretch Break plus a goad. I think that Australian research might be just the goad I need. When Stretch Break pops up now, I think about that research and the big payoff from taking a couple of minutes away from the computer. I also don’t, necessarily, perform the stretches displayed. Instead, I’ll get up and walk around, or make a phone call and walk as I talk. Anything to get me out of the chair. This approach has worked so far.

Stretch Break costs $US44.95, so it’s not cheap, but you can download an evaluation version to see whether it works for you. There are some free reminder programs available you might prefer, or you can set any one of dozens of other programs to pop up an alert at regular intervals. But none of those gives you the thoughtful exercises and visual cues Stretch Break offers, and which really help you notice what’s happening to your body as you sit there. I think it’s worth the money.