Exact amount of time you should sit, stand, sleep and move for optimal health revealed

IF YOU think about it, most of our days are made up of sitting, standing, sleeping and moving for differing amounts of time.

Even if you have a vague idea of how many hours of kip you should clock in a night and how might time you should spend exercising, you probably don’t pay too much attention to how many hours you’re devoting to each.

Now, a new study has identified the ideal amount of time you should spend standing, sitting, sleeping, and engaging in physical activity – down to the minute.

These recommendations on how to carve up the 24 hours of each day aim to help people achieve optimum health, researchers from rom Swinburne University of Technology in Australia said.

The study team, lead by Dr Christian Brakenridge, analysed sleeping, sitting and moving habits of 2,000 for 24 hours to work out the ideal breakdown of activities.

“We show that optimal compositions of time use involved substantially less time spent sitting, a greater time spent standing and a substantially greater time being physically active than the times being achieved on average for each of these activities by the participants in our study,” researchers wrote.

But when it came to sleeping time, participants tended to meet optimum health requirements.

Published in the journal Diabetologia, the study made the following time-use recommendations to ensure optimum health:

• Sitting: an average of six hours (between 5 hours 40 minutes and 7 hours 10 minutes)
• Standing: an average of five hours and 10 minutes (between 4 hours 10 minutes and 6 hours 10 minutes)
• Sleeping: an average of eight hours and 20 minutes (between 7 hours 30 minutes and 9 hours)
• Light-intensity physical activity: an average of two hours and 10 minutes (between 2 hours and 2 hours and 20 minutes)
• Moderate-to-vigorous intensity physical activity: an average of two hours and 10 minutes (between 1 hour 40 minutes and 2 hours 20 minutes)

Dr Brakenridge, who led the team, referred to this balance of activities as the “Goldilocks zone” of health outcomes.

“For different health markers, from waist circumference to fasting glucose, there would be different levels for each behaviour,” Dr Brakenridge told Medical Xpress.

“This breakdown encompasses a wide range of health markers and converges on the 24 hours associated with overall optimal health.”

Researchers observed participants’ health outcomes in order to make their recommendations.

“Shorter sitting time and more time spent standing, undergoing physical activity, and sleeping are associated with preferable cardiometabolic health,” they explained.

When it came to people with type 2 diabetes, they observed that spending more time being active rather than sitting also helped improve their overall blood sugar levels.

Dr Brakenridge said the studies recommendations aimed to be realistic to what people could achieve throughout the day.

“People may advocate for more time exercising, though it’s not feasible to have 10 hours of exercise and zero hours of sedentary behaviour – the time use has to be realistic and balanced,” he explained.

“Of course, moving as much as you can is always encouraged when so much of life requires us to be sitting in front of screens.

“Shorter sitting time and more time spent standing, undergoing physical activity and sleeping give great boosts to our cardiometabolic health.

“It’s also important to acknowledge that this data is a recommendation for an able adult.

“We all have different considerations, and above all, movement should be fun.”

He added there are nuances to how we carve up our time throughout the day.

“Sleeping may be detrimental to health if it replaces exercise time, but beneficial if it replaces sedentary behaviour,” Dr Brakenridge added.

“This is why we need integrated guidelines considering the full spectrum of human behaviour,” he said.

One average, the NHS recommends that adults get between seven and nine hours of sleep a night.

Meanwhile it recommends that people spread their stints of exercise over four or five days to a week.

According to NHS physical activity guidelines, adults should aim to:

• Do strengthening activities that work all the major muscle groups (legs, hips, back, abdomen, chest, shoulders and arms) on at least 2 days a week
• Do at least 150 minutes of moderate intensity activity a week or 75 minutes of vigorous intensity activity a week
• Reduce time spent sitting or lying down and break up long periods of not moving with some activity

Research published last year found that sitting for ten hours a day, whether that’s at work or watching TV, “rapidly” increases the risk of dementia.

Inactivity has been linked to diabetes, heart disease, poor mental health and a general risk of dying young.