Date: 16/04/2022 Shift: 12:30 PM – 2:30 PM Q. No: 154

The Covid-19 pandemic has knocked many people – literally. At first, many schools switched to online classes. When some of these schools resumed in-person classes, they cut down on students moving from place to place. Likewise, many companies let people work from home. This means fewer people have been walking to bus stops or roaming around schools or workplaces. People now spend extra time sitting. This increasingly couch-potato lifestyle is not good for health. The human body was meant to move. Limiting that movement can lead to a host of problems, from expanding waistlines and higher blood pressure to increasing risks of chronic disease, such as diabetes. Now, a growing body of data shows the brain also suffers when we don’t move enough. And this can contribute to mental health problems that may emerge during your teen years. Jacob Barkley is an exercise scientist at Kent State University in Ohio. He was part of a team that asked 398 college students and teachers, last year, about their activities before and after in-person classes stopped in March 2020. Those who had exercised the most now became less physically active, on average. On the flip side, folks who had been less active before now did more physical activity after the class shutdowns. Yet sedentary time went up — a lot — for the whole group. From April to June 2020, the people they surveyed sat almost eight hours more per week, on average, than they had before. Barkley’s team shared its findings in the 1 September 2020 International Journal of Exercise Science.