How much time do you spend inactive each day?

According to the most recent survey conducted by the Australian Bureau of Statistics (2013), the typical Australian adult spends an average of 39 hours a week performing sedentary activities. Furthermore, those employed in administrative and office jobs spent an average of 22 hours a week sitting. This doesn’t include the time spent commuting to and from their place of work!

Further evidence of sedentary behaviour is observed with the Australian Bureau of Statistics (2013) finding that less than one in five Australian’s were reaching the recommended daily 10,000 steps. A study by Gibson et al. (2013) on academic and administrative employees across Australia, USA, Canada and the UK found that the average daily step count was only a measly 3,783.

Office workers are not alone when it comes to these issues. High school and university students are also at risk, spending large quantities of time studying seated at a desk. Prolonged sitting in a poor seated posture can lead to injury or aggravation of an existing injury.

But what is all this time spent sitting down doing to our bodies? Across the coming months, this series of blogs will be dissecting multiple regions of the body and how our current sedentary lifestyles are affecting it. Each region will look into which muscles are becoming weak and lengthened, contracted and short and how our joints can be sitting in positions that can predispose us to pain or injury.

References

Australian Bureau of Statistics (2013). Australian Health Survey: Physical Activity, 2011-12. Retrieved from: http://www.abs.gov.au/ausstats/abs@.nsf/lookup/7838D948C8549693CA257BAC0015F644?opendocument (May 16, 2015)

Gibson, N., Faulkner, G., Murphy, M., Umstattd Meyer, M., Washington, T., Ryde, G., Arbour-Nicitpopoulos, K., Dillon, K. (2013). Walk@Work: An automated intervention to increase walking in university employees not achieving 10,000 daily steps, Preventative Medicine, Vol 56(5), p283-287

Posted 20th October 2015