Is sitting for too long bad for your health?

We’ve heard it so many times before right….get up, move, exercise, sitting is bad for you…

Well a new global study has shown that sitting for too long really IS bad for your health.

The new study involved data gathered on more than 1.1 billion adults across more than 54 countries including American, European, Eastern Mediterranean, Southeast Asian and Western Pacific populations. The researchers assessed the sitting time for each population group and compared this with the data on the national population “life table” which estimates how likely a person is to die before their next birthday from any cause.

The results showed that across the 54 countries a sitting time of three hours or more each day was responsible for around 3.8% or 433,000 of all-cause deaths.

The bad news for Australians is that 2015 data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics is that working adults spend an average 22 hours and 10 minutes per week in a combination of sitting for work and travel purposes. Yes, your maths is correct: that’s an average of just over three hours per day.

The good news though was that the study found that reducing sitting time, even just by 30 minutes per day, could have an instant impact on death risk by increasing life expectancy by 0.2 years. That is not much but cutting two hours per day off your sitting time reduces your death risk by 300%, that’s a pretty impressive number….and an easy goal to achieve.