Growing up in Harlem, Tazzarie Washington was always strolling to the park to meet with friends or play basketball. His weekdays in class were broken up by walks to various rooms or buildings, to school and back home. In those days “I was a smaller kid,” Washington tells Yahoo. In 2019, he was “pretty much active every day.” Then in March of 2020, the pandemic hit the United States. Suddenly, Zoom school replaced Washington’s classroom shuffle.
COVID lockdowns in New York City meant that going to see friends or play basketball with them in the park was out of the question. “I really wasn’t getting much activity because we couldn’t go outside, and the house I was living in was pretty much packed to the brim, so it was hard to even move around there,” says Washington, who was 14 at the time. “Every day I’d wake up super sluggish, and I just wanted to lay in bed,” he says. With him stuck at home, Washington’s physical activity dropped to nearly zero. He was “borderline depressed” and eating lots of sweets to cope. Over the next year and a half, his weight rose to more than 300 pounds.
Washington is among many children, adolescents and adults whose activity levels dropped precipitously when the world effectively shut down. Between 2013 and March of 2020, the average amount of time Americans spent sitting was actually falling, decreasing by more than an hour, according to a recent JAMA research letter. And the share of the U.S. population spending six or more hours sedentary fell from nearly 55% to just over 35%. But the pandemic stopped the trend in its proverbial tracks.
It’s now been over five years since the pandemic put the world — and us — on pause. Gyms and parks are open again, but some vestiges of that time, like Zoom school and grocery delivery, never left. So where do things stand now? Are we on the move again or still stuck to the couch? We investigated.
What was getting Americans moving pre-COVID?
Experts credit one phrase for much of the trend. In 2014, leading obesity expert Dr. James Levine dubbed sitting “the new smoking” in a research paper and then a book. He hypothesized that, with smoking prevalence down dramatically, sitting was now killing more people.
Being too sedentary for too long raises risks for some of the most common life-threatening diseases in the U.S., including heart disease, type 2 diabetes, metabolic syndrome, certain cancers and death from any cause. So Levine’s phrase comparing sitting to smoking got a lot of attention from the press and from Americans themselves, Glenn Gaesser, professor of exercise physiology in the College of Health Solutions at Arizona State University, tells Yahoo.
But Gaesser and Bethany Barone Gibbs, an epidemiologist who studies physical activity, are not entirely convinced that that attention actually translated to action. Because the subjects of the JAMA study documented their own sedentary time (rather than it being tracked by smartphone or another more accurate device), the experts wonder if the decline in sitting time was real. “It could hopefully reflect a true population in what people were doing, but at the very least it might reflect an awareness that too much sitting is not good for [people],” driving them to report fewer hours spent sitting on their couch.
Pandemic lockdowns ended, but the sitting didn’t
According to the JAMA report, the average number of hours Americans spent sitting each day stayed about the same even after the world began to reopen. During the period between 2017 and 2020, people were spending 5.9 hours a day sedentary. “I’m not surprised at all to see that the [declining sedentary time] trend did not continue after the pandemic,” says Barone Gibbs. “During the initial lockdown period, there was just nothing to do; people couldn’t leave their home and sat around a lot.”
It’s hardly surprising that activity decreased amid lockdowns. But by July 2021, the majority of the country was open with few restrictions, according to the New York Times. By April 2023, the national state of emergency due to COVID was officially declared over. Yet from 2021 to 2023, the amount of time Americans were sedentary remained stable at six hours, the JAMA report suggests. “I think there have been some behavioral changes in the way that we do things and some technological advances, during work and leisure time, that are contributing to more sitting,” says Barone Gibbs. Zoom school and meetings were the new normal amid lockdowns, but they have stayed the norm for some students — especially those in college and higher education — and white-collar workers. Spending on food delivery shot up amid the pandemic and never fell back down. Office commutes and grocery trips that once represented opportunities for incidental exercise became unnecessary inconveniences, notes Barone Gibbs. It wasn’t so much the pandemic but the technology, which became prevalent during lockdowns, that has changed our sitting habits and physical activity, she suspects.
Are we back on our feet?
There isn’t much data about physical activity or sedentary time after 2023 yet. But neither Gaesser nor Barone Gibbs think much has changed since. “Getting the average time spent sitting below six hours “is probably not going to be achievable,” says Gaesser. “We live in a sedentary society where most people’s jobs [involve] a lot of sitting.”
However, there are some promising signs that people may be getting back to more active lifestyles. In 2024, a record 25% of Americans ages 6 and older belonged to gyms, health clubs or fitness studios, according to data from the Health & Fitness Association. But there’s a wrinkle to that good news, says Barone Gibbs: The people who can afford those memberships aren’t the ones most at risk of the health problems associated with too much sedentary time. “The people we’re really worried about are the ones who are lower income and don’t have flexibility in their job [to find time to work out]; they don’t have that kind of luxury,” says Barone Gibbs.
So how do we get more active?
It’s ultimately a highly personal question. For Washington, it was a personal tragedy that spurred him to change course. Washington’s father had multiple health issues, including stomach cancer, high blood pressure and diabetes, he says. When his father died in November 2022, “it was a wake-up call,” Washington says. “He had a lot of health problems, and considering my own weight and that I had high blood pressure at the time, I felt like something had to change.”
Washington started educating himself about better nutrition. He quit sugar and fatty foods “cold turkey,” and started hitting the gym two or three times a week, eventually increasing his workouts to six or seven times a week. In less than two years, Washington was down to 180 pounds. “It was really hard considering that I didn’t have many examples when it came to losing weight,” he says. “After a while, you’re able to grasp that fact that you’re bettering yourself; once you’re ingesting good food and moving around feeling your heart pumping, your sweat dripping and knowing the [excess] fat is slipping away — that’s the motivation and the goal.”
Experts say it doesn’t necessarily take a life-altering event to get moving, but it’s important to find your individual motivation and the activities that work for you. For starters, both Barone Gibbs and Gaesser point out that it’s not just about sitting less but a matter of moving more. “If you have a person that is a couch potato and doesn’t do any physical activity and you ask what would improve the health of that person: Sit an hour less a day, or increase physical activity to meet the minimum; there’s no question that they would have much bigger benefits from physical activity,” Gaesser says.
So rather than opt for a standing desk, try to incorporate daily walks into your routine. You don’t have to start living at the gym — in fact it’s probably more sustainable (and affordable) to just add movement to your day-to-day life, such as walking. Or try taking short breaks from work to do some “exercise snacks.” Or maybe you want to unsubscribe from your grocery delivery service and start going to the grocery store. “Figure out ways to make walking purposeful and meaningful and find ways to get more movement in across the day,” says Barone Gibbs.
