Get off the couch, Baby Boomers, or you may not be able to later

Count the number of hours you sit each day. Be honest.

“If you commute an hour in the morning and hour after work — that’s two hours, and if you sit at an eight-hour-a-day desk job that’s 10,” says epidemiologist Loretta DiPietro of the Milken Institute School of Public Health at George Washington University.

“Then you come home at, say, 6 p.m., eat dinner and crash into your recliner for another three to four hours,” says DiPietro. “That’s 13 to 14 hours of sitting.”

Being immobile like that for many hours each day does more than raise the risk of a host of diseases. DiPietro and her colleagues have good evidence that, as the years wear on, it actually reduces the ability of older people to get around on foot at all.

In a study of sitting and walking ability that surveyed people ages 50 to 71 across 8 to 10 years, those who tended to sit the most and move the least had more than three times the risk of difficulty walking by the end of the study, when compared to their more active counterparts.

Some ended up unable to walk at all. The study appears in the current issue of The Journals of Gerontology: Medical Sciences.

Prolonged sitting and TV watching were particularly harmful, DiPietro found, especially when combined with low levels of total physical activity. Young bodies may rebound from prolonged sitting with an hour at the gym, she says. But that seems less true in late middle age.

“Sitting and watching TV for long periods, especially in the evening,” she says, “has got to be one of the most dangerous things that older people can do.” And the period studied — the mid-1990s to 2005, or so — was even before the advent of rampant online streaming of shows, she notes. The problem today is likely even worse.

“Before binge watching, at least when a show ended you got up and walked around,” DiPietro says. “It’s now possible to watch several hours without moving.”

Though being sedentary at work is also a risk, office employees tend to at least get up now and then, walk down the hall to the printer or restroom, and go to lunch, she says. Or at least workers used to do that. Increasingly, she says, many of us of all ages are engineering much of that light activity out of our lives.