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Comment by freitzkriesler2 | Hacker News Reader

"moderate-to-vigorous physical activity time might seem a quite high, at more than 2 hours a day, we defined it as more than 100 steps per minute. This equates to a brisk walk."

The scale here made me laugh. So does actually going to the gym to break a sweat make it extreme physical activity?

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I feel like all these articles/research are written from an extreme American perspective where people never move unless it’s from the couch to the car. You basically can’t exist in a European (and many others) lifestyle without getting this much exercise every day.

Most people in Europe would not qualify. The standard getting around the city paces are not fast enough for the threshold defined in this paper.

It's right there in the comment above, 100 steps/minutes. Just over one and a half steps a second. It's not ambling around window shopping, but that's not really that brisk at all if you're going somewhere.

Nothing prevents somebody in Europe to stay at home without significant exercising all day, especially now as a lot of jobs are work-from-home.

I live in an area in France where the car reigns, and if I don’t do conscious exercise every day, I can end up with fewer than 1000 steps a day: Bed to kitchen, to the car, to meetings, then back home.

Basically the "averages" are so paheticly sedentary and unhealthy that getting any physical activity puts you in the outlier.

Breaking a sweat puts you above zone 2, which is basically extreme even by athlete standards and they spend less than 20% of their training time actually sweating.

I don't know what athletes you're looking at that don't break a sweat training.

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