This job loads your body as much as your mind, without you noticing

I used to be someone who played pro basketball, did multiple sports like American football and boxing, and after that was training for strongman competitions. But in every game release period, because I had to sit so much, I got injured or my athletic performance dropped almost every single time. The last one was last year, while I was putting out an update for Metal Thunder.

The weight side is part of this too. Under normal conditions I always moved between 130-160 kg, and especially in game launch periods I would climb to 160-170 and then lose it again once the stress passed. I repeated that almost every year.

In those stretches I was in a bulking phase, so I was heavier than usual, 170kg, and then I went through one of the hardest things I have been through so far. Last year, sitting where I sit, probably from sitting wrong, I herniated a 20mm disc at L4-L5 and lost control of my right leg for 1.5 months.

For someone who defines himself by strength and athleticism, that was a huge mental and physical collapse. For the first 3 months I could barely walk, and the moment I could get back to training I started rehab entirely for the back and the leg. It has been almost 1 year and I am only now coming back to myself. Anyone who has had a back injury knows that something as simple as sitting turns into torture. If I sit for more than 1 hour the pain still comes straight in, and I cannot walk distances further than 2km, when my daily average used to be around 30km in some periods. Of course I had to put weight on in the process and went up to the 190s. Right now my problem is losing the extra weight and downsizing again. Strongman and game development are not very compatible things, and I might be a bit of an extreme example, but this holds in general for anyone who sits at a desk for very long hours, and unfortunately the back is not the only place this job leaves its mark.

The back was my share of it. There is another, far less discussed side of long sitting, the thing they say about not sitting too much on a plane. The same applies to us. We are not sitting in a pressurised cabin, of course, but the longer you sit the higher the chance of throwing a clot. It is called DVT, and when the blood that pools in your legs or arms while you stay still for a long time clots, you really can be in danger of dying. In 2011 in England, a twenty year old boy collapsed in the street and died after days of twelve hour Xbox marathons. The coroner said the clot that formed in his left calf travelled to the lung, and the boy had no other condition. He had been accepted to study game design at university. If you are not in a risk group and you are not sitting 8-10 hours a day without a break this is not something to be very afraid of, but it is worth knowing, and preventing it is relatively simple.

The side that is not as harsh but is far more common is the neck. Almost everyone doing this work has some kind of neck problem, starting with a straightened neck curve. Over time it wrecks your posture and it gives you constant headaches. The more your neck has to pull your head, the more it tires you mentally, and it makes an already aching head worse.

Now think about your own crunch week. You are taking a build, you are in the same chair for fourteen hours, the only place you get up for is the toilet or maybe food, and you do it for days in a row. That multiplies all three at once, the back, the veins and the neck.

I am not writing this to scare you, because all of it can be made up for. In a study that pooled data from more than a million people, one hour a day of moderate movement almost entirely wipes out the raised risk that comes with sitting a lot. So the thing finishing you off is not the hours you spend in the chair, it is doing nothing at all outside those hours.

Most of you do not have that one hour, and I know you do not. The dose that actually works is much smaller. In people made to sit for eight hours, the only thing that brought down both blood pressure and blood sugar turned out to be getting up every half hour and walking for five minutes, and the blood sugar spike after a meal drops by 58%. The study is eleven people, so it is small, but five minutes should not be too much for anyone.

It is not much. Giving at least 1-1.5 hours a day in total to sport and movement is enough. You can spread it across the day, and at the very least get up out of your seat every 2 hours. Your output goes up and most of these risks go to zero. Health really is more important than everything else.