Researchers were surprised to find that young people were not nearly as active as they suspected, noticing a significant decline in activity in teen years. The decline was so remarkable that it turned out that 19-year-olds got to the point where they became as inactive as 60-year-olds.
They also found that younger children were not getting the World Health Organization’s recommended hour of moderate-to-vigorous exercise each day. When examining the data for children ages 6-11, they discovered a quarter of boys and half of girls were not exercising enough. For teens it was even worse, with half of boys and 75% of girls not reaching that goal.
The sleep deprivation so often seen in teens could be to blame for these low rates of activity. Vadim Zipunnikov, the study’s senior author from the department of biostatistics at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health says, “One of the major contributors to low levels of physical activity in children might be that they don’t get enough sleep.”
A sedentary lifestyle — sitting on the couch and skipping the gym — is even worse for your health than previously imagined. A study in the European Journal of Preventive Cardiology published earlier this year found that not exercising at all is basically just as bad for you as being obese.
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