Abstract
BackgroundTo provide a detailed description of young adults’ sedentary time and physical activity.Methods384 young women and 389 young men aged 22.1 ± 0.6 years, all participants in the 22 year old follow-up of the Raine Study pregnancy cohort, wore Actigraph GT3X+ monitors on the hip for 24 h/day over a one-week period for at least one ‘valid’ day (≥10 h of waking wear time). Each minute epoch was classified as sedentary, light, moderate or vigorous intensity using 100 count and Freedson cut-points. Mixed models assessed hourly and daily variation; t-tests assessed gender differences.ResultsThe average (mean ± SD) waking wear time was 15.0 ± 1.6 h/day, of which 61.4 ± 10.1 % was spent sedentary, 34.6 ± 9.1 % in light-, 3.7 ± 5.3 % in moderate- and, 0.3 ± 0.6 % in vigorous-intensity activity. Average time spent in moderate to vigorous activity (MVPA) was 36.2 ± 27.5 min/day. Relative to men, women had higher sedentary time, but also higher vigorous activity time. The ‘usual’ bout duration of sedentary time was 11.8 ± 4.5 min in women and 11.7 ± 5.2 min in men. By contrast, other activities were accumulated in shorter bout durations. There was large variation by hour of the day and by day of the week in both sedentary time and MVPA. Evenings and Sundays through Wednesdays tended to be particularly sedentary and/or inactive.ConclusionFor these young adults, much of the waking day was spent sedentary and many participants were physically inactive (low levels of MVPA). We provide novel evidence on the time for which activities were performed and on the time periods when young adults were more sedentary and/or less active. With high sedentary time and low MVPA, young adults may be at risk for the life-course sequelae of these behaviours.Electronic supplementary materialThe online version of this article (doi:10.1186/s12966-016-0363-0) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.
Highlights
To provide a detailed description of young adults’ sedentary time and physical activity
The closest to a young adult group examined has been from the NHANES study, which reported that young adults aged 20–29 years spend approximately 55 % of their waking day in sedentary time and 40 min per day in moderate- and vigorous-intensity physical activity (MVPA) [6, 20]
The average sedentary time for the 22 year olds in the present study (9.2 h/day of 15.0 h/day waking wear time; 61 %) was slightly higher than that observed in 300 young adults aged 20–29 years in the NHANES survey (7.5 of 13.9 h/day waking wear; ≈54 %) [6] and the 8.4 of 14.6 h/day (58 %) observed in Belgian adults aged 20–65 years and slightly under the estimates reported in Canadian men and women aged 20–39 years of 9.5 h/day of 14.8 h/day (64 %) and 9.5 of 14.5 h/day (66 %), respectively [22, 23]
Summary
To provide a detailed description of young adults’ sedentary time and physical activity. A few studies with objective measures have included a proportion of young adults in samples across very broad age ranges [6, 22,23,24] Of these studies, the closest to a young adult group examined has been from the NHANES study, which reported that young adults aged 20–29 years spend approximately 55 % of their waking day in sedentary time and 40 min per day in MVPA [6, 20]. These reports did not examine how sedentary time or physical activity were accumulated nor when, in terms of time of day or day of the week These studies help to identify young adults as a potential key target group for prevention efforts, the pattern of how and when young adults accumulate sedentary behaviour and physical activity has not been well characterised. There is limited detailed information to help inform interventions targeting this group
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