A lot of people in here talking about how they started doing some activity once 2-3 times a week. Wow. Good for you, that can have some nice benefits.
It has nothing to do with the stated concern based on the cited research whatsoever at all.
The issues raised here refer to base level physical activity and its influence on things like triglyceride and cholesterol behaviors. And the repeating pattern is that even small activities, like moving around to get a drink, or just standing, literally doing nothing else, raise you into the threshold where your body is "normal" in how it deals with these things.
Sitting, however, seems to be an outlier, allowing a degradation of these processes. Well guess what? Exercising once a day even won't change that, as the response time is quick. SO this isn't about you being a bike commuter, a rock climber, or a swimmer. It's about sitting specifically. It's about mounting evidence that our bodies evolved to expect constant muscular activity even at low levels and the near zero that happens during sitting is an outlier.
You know, sitting is fairly unusual. In many areas of the world, both ancient and modern, people don't really sit. They squat, or stand, or shuffle around, but full on sitting is uncommon for a lot of people. I betcha the ol' asian/slavic squat activates enough muscles to not count as sitting.
In one of the papers they even concede that heavy fidgeting might be enough to breach the threshold.
So really what we're talking about is getting out of your chair, moving around, all the time if possible. Yeah that's hard for a programmer. Plus you can't ignore even very current research showing that standing itself, is harmful when doing it too much (for totally unrelated reasons.) So standing desks are a bad plan too.
You know, I can't sit that long. I am not too worried about this for me. I shift around too much. Stand and wander in thought, get drinks, go to the bathroom, slide off my chair and kneel at the desk. Grab the tablet and flop around all over the house (I WFH 100%.) I go crazy staying at the desk constantly, for work anyway. Let's not talk about leisure time :)
But upon reviewing a number of these studies, this is apparently exactly what's needed. Standing 1 minute every hour isn't a enough, no. But it's the right direction. The problem mainly being that sitting in a chair requires little to no physical effort at all whatsoever. That's the issue.
Exercising 2, 3, 5 days a week, 1-2-3 hours? Doesn't matter. Don't confuse the two issues.
That said, I bet those goofy desk bicycling things you put by your chair would do the trick, assuming they actually require some level of effort.