The beneficial effects of physical activity on health are emphasized more and more often. At the same time, it is also mentioned that insufficient physical activity or sedentary lifestyle may lead to the development of many diseases and increase general mortality. In this context, it seems important to conduct research that will determine the level of activity and time spent sitting in different groups and populations. One of the groups whose lifestyle should be monitored are students of medical universities. The relation between physical activity and the time spent sitting has an impact not only on their health, but indirectly it also contributes to the promotion of specific healthy habits among patients with whom they will work in the future. For this reason, in our study we focused primarily on the estimation of the time students spend sitting. It was found that on average they spend more than 46 h a week (2781.8 ± 1238.5 MET-minutes/week) and almost seven hours a day in a sitting position. These results are similar to those obtained in the other studies. For example, Papathanasiou et al. noticed that students spent more than seven hours a day (about 50 h a week) sitting [19], while Loginov et al. observed that students of general universities spent about 50 h a week sitting and those studying at technical universities about 44 h [20]. Another study assessing physical activity and sedentary time among students, however, conducting with using accelerometers not IPAQ, also showed that they spent on average 458.6 min/day being involved in sedentary activities, which corresponded to almost eight hours a day and 54 h a week [15].
The collected data enabled us to make a comparison between the level of physical activity and time spent sitting among the health related faculty students. Most of the students were highly or moderately physically active regardless of how much time they spent sitting. Rosenberg et al. showed that the participants who were sitting a lot were classified as representing physical activity categories just like those who were sitting the least [6]. In turn, Bauman et al. observed that as the time spent sitting became longer, the low level of physical activity increased whereas the high level decreased [1].
Based on the above-mentioned research it can be said that time spent sitting is not associated with physical activity. That is why it can-not be directly interpreted that people who spend many hours sitting are inactive. Much more often they follow current recommendations for physical activity and can be classified as moderately or even highly active people. For example, students who spend most of the day learning in a sitting position can also go to the gym or choose swimming or cycling for a couple of hours during the week. This way they are simultaneously sedentary and physically active people.
A major strength of this study is that we focused on health related faculty students, because this group of students has so far been rarely analyzed. We chose students of Physiotherapy, Pharmacy and Dietetics because in their future work they will spend many hours with their patients, during which they establish a close relationship, thanks to which they often become a role model and can transfer important knowledge about an active lifestyle.
Our study has some limitations. First of all, the number of students in particular fields of health related faculty were not the same, which could have influenced the results. However, this is due to the number of students in individual fields of study. Some fields are very numerous, while others are not.
Secondly, we used the IPAQ and self-report surveys, which may result in over- or underestimation of the results. On the other hand, the IPAQ is a widely used tool for assessment of physical activity and time spent sitting. It can be used in large study populations since it is inexpensive, simple and non-invasive [6, 18, 19, 21, 22]. Its validity and reliability have been proven in numerous studies [6, 23,24,25]. Moreover, to avoid the problem of misreporting due to a lack of understanding of the IPAQ questions [22], we introduced an interviewer to the study, so our results can be compared with other international studies.
Future research on sedentary behaviours should be conducted on large, standardized groups using objective measurement methods. It is worth assessing the time spent sitting in different areas of life [1, 6] as well as the types of sedentary activities to which people devote the most time because not all of them are equally harmful to health [4]. This will allow for supplementing healthy lifestyle recommendations with information on time spent sitting. It may be useful for many people to determine the minimum time spent sitting that is safe for health [1, 3]. Research has shown that modification of sedentary behaviours may bring more promising results in terms of promoting a healthy lifestyle than increasing a physical activity level [5].
