There has been some recent ramblings of a study published by our friends down under in Australia. The study looked at a huge group of people-over 200,000 and their daily movement patterns. Data was analyzed on 621,695 person years (a lot of data) which included time spent exercising, time spent sitting, time spent sleeping, etc. The results were somewhat surprising, somewhat scary and yet a bit to be expected.
First let’s talk about the somewhat expected part: People who moved less died sooner. Fair enough.
The surprising part: The study suggested that ALL kinds of movement mattered and not JUST planned exercise. The piece of data that seemed to correlate most with people dying sooner was, of all things, time spent sitting. The data was simplified and separated into 3 distinct categories as follows: time spent sitting <8 hours, time spent sitting between 8 and 11 hours and time spent sitting >11 hours.
The Scary Part: People who sat for > 11 hours each day had a 40% chance of dying within the next 3 years. Really. If you sit for more than 11 hours each day, you should consider making funeral arrangements.
Our interpretation on this study published in the Archives of Internal Medicine is really pretty simple. People need to minimize the time they spend on their computers, watching television and staring at their smart phones. People need to move more and they need to move more frequently. If you have a ‘sit-down job’, consider getting up and walking to go get a drink. Stand up while you talk on the telephone. Simple little things like parking further away (I’m sure you’ve heard that before) matter and the idea of just moving more here and there can help you live longer. Hey, who wouldn’t want to live a little longer and a little healthier? Here’s a quick link to the article, and for those studious ones, a link to the study: