The average person, everyone knows, is now more sedentary than his predecessors. Your FitBit, your boss’s Apple Watch, and your skinny old neighbor’s pedometer have statistically confirmed this.
Even before the lockdowns, we were doing less walking, less running, less basketball, and less baseball. It’s true for men and women of all ages. And it’s most true for teenagers, a new study suggests.
The researchers, led by Boise State kinesiologist Scott Conger, looked at 16 studies from 1995 to 2017. These studies used fitness trackers of all types to measure how active the wearers were in a given year.
The result: Each decade, adults reduced their daily exercise by an average of 600 steps. That means your uncle got the same exercise you did and then ran an extra half-marathon every month.
Teenagers experienced a drop that was twice as large. Their daily steps dropped by 1,500 each decade. Compare a child to his father 30 years older. That total is 289 miles a year — or over the course of his adolescence, the walk from New York City to Las Vegas.
What are the causes? Where to start?
Of course, smartphones, which are behind nearly every bad social development in the past 15 years, are a culprit.
Then there’s the unlimited channels on TV, the unlimited videos on YouTube, and the video games that are infinitely more involved and addictive than in our youth.
The researchers identified some more interesting possible causes. Children used to walk to school. These days, school districts build schools that are simply for driving to. Your mother drops you off, or you get the school bus. When your high school has 4,000 children and it draws from a 5-mile radius, most students cannot walk. But you get efficiency in size, right?
Maybe hypercompetitive youth sports actually get some of the blame. Fewer children are playing pickup basketball every day, and more are being driven to their travel lacrosse practice. Sure, that’s exercise, but maybe less than what your father got.
On the other hand, we have to entertain the possibility that it’s a statistical illusion — a decreasing selection bias among those who wear fitness devices. Maybe over time, more lazy children got Apple Watches for the apps and FitBits to tell the time.
That is, maybe America’s youth has been sedentary since the Atari came out, and we only recently got the proof.
