Students sit more than people in their seventies: New research shatters a well-known assumption about age

Youth is no longer a reliable indicator of an active life. A study by the National University of Singapore, published in the journal BMC Medicine, found that students in the study groups were less physically active and spent more time sitting than people whose average age was about 74. The finding is striking precisely because it turns the conventional wisdom on its head: the problem of modern sitting may start much earlier than we think.

Researchers analyzed four weeks of wearable data from 1.967 people: 500 college students, 437 working adults, and 1.030 older adults living in the community. The college students averaged about 634 minutes of sedentary time per day, compared with about 501 minutes for the older participants. They also had less overall physical activity and slightly less sleep, while the working adults were mostly in between.

The reason is not necessarily laziness, but the environment. Lectures, studying, working on the computer, watching content and communicating on the phone can turn the whole day into a series of sitting blocks, even when a young person occasionally exercises. Older participants may not have intensive training, but through household chores, walking and getting up more often they can accumulate more movement. This is precisely the important difference: one hour in the gym does not automatically erase the rest of the day spent in a chair.

The study also found a link between reallocating 30 minutes a day toward more activity, less sitting, or more sleep and better measures of body mass and vascular health. This is not proof that the same change will produce the same results for every person, as it is observational data from Singaporean groups. However, the message is practical: health is not built just by exercise, but also by how the remaining 23 hours are allocated.

The most realistic answer is not extreme challenges, but more frequent breaks from sitting. A short walk between tasks, standing while talking on the phone, taking the stairs, sitting at a desk farther away in the library, or moving around for a few minutes every hour can increase daily activity without any special equipment. For students, but also for anyone who works behind a screen, a more useful question is not just “did I exercise today,” but “how much did I move throughout the day?”

Article prepared with the support of AI tools.