Sedentary behaviour

Sedentary behaviour is any waking behaviour that uses very little energy, 1.5 METs or less, while you are sitting, reclining or lying down. In plain terms, it is time awake spent sitting or lying without doing much: working at a computer, driving, reading or watching TV (Tremblay et al., 2017).

That definition comes from an international consensus project of the Sedentary Behavior Research Network, set up because researchers were using the same words to mean different things. A MET is a multiple of the body’s resting energy use, and activities such as computer use or sitting in a car typically fall between 1.0 and 1.5 METs.

Sedentary is not the same as inactive

The consensus separates three ideas that are easy to mix up (Tremblay et al., 2017):

• Sedentary behaviour is about posture and energy: sitting, reclining or lying while awake, using 1.5 METs or less.
• Physical inactivity is about meeting activity guidelines. For adults, it means not reaching 150 minutes of moderate-to-vigorous activity a week, or 75 minutes of vigorous activity, or a combination.
• Stationary behaviour covers any waking time without walking about, including standing still. Working at a standing desk counts as stationary, not sedentary.

The same project defined a sedentary bout as a period of uninterrupted sedentary time, and a break as any non-sedentary bout between two sedentary ones. That is the scientific language behind microbreaks.

The practical point: you can meet the activity guidelines with a few runs a week and still be highly sedentary if you sit for most of the working day.

How sedentary are desk workers?

Very. In 50 office workers who wore activity monitors for a week, sedentary time made up 81.8% of their working hours, compared with 68.9% of their time outside work (Parry & Straker, 2013). To see what that adds up to over a year, try the sitting time calculator or read How much of your year do you spend sitting?

What is sedentary behaviour linked to?

General health

The World Health Organization links higher amounts of sedentary behaviour in adults with higher all-cause, cardiovascular and cancer mortality, and with more cardiovascular disease, cancer and type 2 diabetes. It also reports that 31% of the world’s adults, about 1.8 billion people, are physically inactive (WHO).

The WHO’s 2020 guidelines recommend limiting sedentary time for everyone, alongside 150 to 300 minutes of moderate activity a week for adults. The guideline group found the evidence insufficient to set a specific threshold for sedentary time (Bull et al., 2020).

Activity changes the picture. In a pooled analysis of more than a million people, about 60 to 75 minutes a day of moderate-intensity activity seemed to eliminate the higher risk of death linked with long sitting time. It reduced, but did not remove, the higher risk linked with long TV viewing (Ekelund et al., 2016).

Musculoskeletal pain

The link with back and neck pain is less clear than many people assume. A systematic review found that self-reported workplace sitting was associated with low back pain and neck or shoulder pain in cross-sectional studies, but the results were less consistent when sitting was measured with devices, and prospective evidence was insufficient. Studies that reduced workplace sitting found less low back, neck and shoulder pain, and the authors noted that reverse causality could not be ruled out for the cross-sectional findings (Dzakpasu et al., 2021). For desk-related back pain, see lower back pain from sitting.

Common misunderstandings

• “Standing all day solves it.” By definition, standing still is stationary rather than sedentary, but it isn’t movement either.
• “My posture while I sit is what matters.” For neck pain, a one-year study of adults found that the neck angle while using a phone didn’t predict pain, while insufficient physical activity and poor sleep did (Correia et al., 2025). See text neck.
• “Long sitting tightens your hip flexors.” It is often said; the evidence is thinner than the idea. See hip flexors.

For employers thinking about the hours their teams spend seated, Bavelu for teams describes the workplace side. The app’s desk routines of two to four minutes, designed and filmed by physiotherapists, are made for the breaks between sedentary bouts.