Sedentariness has become a major problem in the life of modern people. However, via a simple exercise, you can train a muscle, weighing only one percent of the body weight, while sitting. Exercising this muscle can burn sugar and fat in the blood, reducing the negative effect of sedentary behavior.
Sedentariness Has Become an Epidemic; Lack of Exercise is the Fourth Leading Cause of Death
“Physical inactivity and sedentary behavior” have become another pandemic for years in the world, according to an article published in the journal Progress in Cardiovascular Diseases in 2021.According to a trend analysis, people’s self-estimated total sitting time increased by around one hour daily from 2007 to 2016. Other reports suggest that the average sitting time for adults in the United States is probably much longer than the self-estimated amounts. It might be seven to 11.5 hours daily.
Inactivity rises as people get older. The situation is more serious for women than for men, and for high-income countries than for lower-income ones, The Lancet reported in 2012.
One of the consequences of physical inactivity and sedentary behavior is a significant increase in the risk of cardiovascular diseases, said a report published by Nature Reviews Cardiology in May 2021. The highest risk of cardiovascular diseases is among older people over 65, who have lower physical activity levels than people of all other ages, according to the report.
In addition, physical inactivity can also cause other diseases such as stroke, breast cancer, coronary heart disease, Type 2 diabetes, and colon cancer. Lack of physical activity has become the fourth leading cause of mortality; about 3.2 million people died due to insufficient physical activity, according to the World Health Organization (WHO).
A Muscle of Only 1 Percent of the Body Weight Can Activate the Entire Body’s Metabolism
Marc Hamilton, professor of Health and Human Performance at the University of Houston, and his team recently published an astonishing discovery in the journal iScience.While weighing 1 kg, only about one percent of our body weight, the soleus muscle in the calf can do a lot to improve our metabolism, according to the article. If it is activated correctly, it can burn a lot of fats and blood glucose (sugar), in addition to raising “local oxidative metabolism to high levels for hours,” wrote Hamilton and his team.
Most muscles get energy by breaking down glycogen, but the soleus muscle uses mostly fats and glucose. Therefore, this muscle can contribute a lot to improving metabolism.
The soleus muscle is a long and flat muscle in the shape of a soleus.
It stretches from the back of the kneecap to the heel, forming the calf muscle or triceps with two other muscles. It also has the largest physiological cross-sectional area (CSA) of the calf muscles. The soleus muscle also offers up to 71 percent of the triceps’s strength. In addition, the soleus muscle helps us maintain the standing posture.
It has curvy capillaries that contract relatively slowly and are resistant to fatigue. The soleus muscle is composed of mostly slow-twitch fibers—on average, about 80 percent. In contrast, the gastrocnemius and lateral femoral muscles, which are adjacent to the soleus muscle, contain about 57 percent slow-twitch fibers on average.
Unlike fast-twitch fibers, which consume a lot of energy quickly during exercise and make people feel tired and need to rest, slow-twitch fibers consume energy slowly and evenly, which helps them keep working for a long time without running out of energy quickly.
Soleus Muscle Push-ups Can Control Blood Glucose and Have Anti-sedentary Effects
People are sometimes forced to be sedentary. For instance, some people need to work at a desk, and the elderly and disabled people with limited mobility might be unable to walk independently.Hamilton and his team have developed a way to utilize the special characteristics of the soleus muscle, which can benefit people with a sedentary lifestyle.
In Hamilton’s experiment, the subjects were divided into two groups, who all ingested 75 grams of glucose. The control group was sitting inactive, and the experimental group was doing “soleus push-ups” (SPU), the movement developed by Hamilton’s team. After three hours, their blood was tested. The team found that the SPU activity could help the soleus muscle “raise local oxidative metabolism to high levels for hours without fatigue.” It can also reduce postprandial glucose excursion by 52 percent and hyperinsulinemia by 60 percent.
In another experiment, the whole-body energy expenditure for participants in the SPU group is 2.25 times that of the sitting inactive control group.
The oxygen consumption for the SPU group was more than twice that of the control group because the SPU can consume a lot of fat and sugar in the blood.
In comparison with the control group, the levels of triglycerides in the blood of the subjects in the SPU group were also significantly lower.
In the experiment to test oxygen consumption and energy expenditure of the lower limbs, the team found that in comparison with walking and running on a treadmill, doing SPU can make the muscles consume more oxygen.
Moreover, the movement of the SPU is much smaller than walking, but its energy consumption is almost on par with walking.
This is because the soleus muscle can directly burn fat and sugar in the blood with oxygen, instead of breaking down glycogen to get energy.
How to do the SPU
The SPU is actually very simple. You just have to sit and move your heels:- Sit with your feet flat on the floor and spread your feet to the same width as your shoulders; your knees can bend about 70 to 90 degrees.
- Lift your heels while the fronts of your feet remain on the floor; stay still.
- After lifting your heels to the highest point, let them fall down naturally and touch the floor.
The method of SPU effectively contracts the soleus muscle.
A tip for this exercise is that the knees should bend 70 to 90 degrees. Thus, the soleus muscle can give more work of plantar flexion, while the other muscles on the calf remain relaxed. As a result, the soleus muscle can exercise most efficiently, according to Hamilton’s report.
His team also explained that while the SPU looks similar to walking, their mechanisms are opposite to each other. Due to the structure of the human body, during walking, the energy consumption of the soleus muscle is minimized; that is, this muscle is the least used. However, the method of SPU reverses the situation. It helps the soleus muscle work and consumes more energy instead of using the other two muscles on the calf.
