College life can feel like a constant rush between lectures, assignments, and late nights. But a study from the National University of Singapore (NUS) found that students averaging about 20 years old accumulated 100 fewer minutes of daily physical activity than community-dwelling adults averaging 74.
The students also recorded more than 10.5 hours of sedentary time each day, raising questions about how much movement fits into modern campus life. The findings, published in BMC Medicine, point toward an overlooked public health concern among young adults whose routines may leave surprisingly little room to move.
What the activity rings actually measured
Researchers at NUS Medicine’s Centre for Sleep and Cognition analyzed four weeks of Oura Ring recordings from 1,967 people in Singapore. The three groups included university students, working-age adults averaging about 41, and older adults living in the community.
Students averaged 320 minutes of physical activity per day, compared with 347 minutes among working adults and 420 minutes among older participants. Those totals include light movement alongside moderate and vigorous activity, so they should not be read as hours spent exercising at the gym.
More than two extra hours of sedentary time
The gap looked just as striking when researchers examined sedentary behavior. Students averaged 634 minutes daily, compared with 581 minutes among working adults and 501 minutes among older adults, a difference of about two hours and 13 minutes between the youngest and oldest groups.
Sleep added another layer to the picture, with students allocating about 432 minutes a day to it, compared with 446 and 456 minutes in the other groups. Yet older adults had the shortest actual sleep because their nights were more fragmented, showing why time allocated to sleep and time actually asleep are different measures.
Weekends widened the movement gap
Would a break from classes give students more time to be active? Their recorded activity actually fell by roughly another 30 minutes on weekends, while weekday movement tended to cluster around the beginning and end of lessons.
Working adults showed a familiar rhythm, with activity concentrated around commutes and lunch breaks before shifting later and spreading out on weekends. Older adults maintained a steadier pattern across the week, suggesting that everyday routines deserve attention alongside scheduled workouts.
Study coauthor Ju Lynn Ong suggested that academic demands, digital lifestyles, food delivery, and ride-hailing could help explain younger adults’ sedentary routines. These were possible explanations, however, rather than causes established by the research.
What a 30-minute shift could mean
To explore the health implications, the team treated movement, sedentary time, and sleep as connected parts of a single day. After all, adding half an hour to one activity means taking that time from something else.
Among working-age and older adults, models linked replacing 30 minutes of sedentary time with physical activity to more favorable markers of body fatness and arterial stiffness. These measures help researchers assess cardiovascular and metabolic health, and the activity category included light movement such as walking.
But the researchers did not ask participants to change their routines and then measure improvements. The substitutions were hypothetical statistical estimates, so the findings show associations rather than proving that a particular change will produce a specific health benefit.
What the study cannot tell us
The researchers did not measure cardiometabolic outcomes in the student group. That means the study cannot establish that these students already had poorer cardiovascular health because of their movement patterns.
The participants were volunteers from three Singaporean cohorts, which also limits how widely the results can be generalized. Comparing different age groups offers a useful snapshot, but it does not show how the same people’s habits change as they grow older.
Bringing everyday movement back
“Public health messaging around physical activity has traditionally focused on preserving mobility and independence in older adults,” said senior author Michael Chee. He argued that prevention efforts should also address the low activity and high sedentary time observed among younger adults.
The researchers called for changes to urban and digital environments that make everyday movement easier to maintain. For campuses, their findings raise a practical question about how walking between destinations and taking movement breaks can fit naturally into days dominated by classes and screens.
The broader concern is what happens if sedentary routines persist for decades, although this study did not track those long-term outcomes. The official press release was published on September 14, 2026, on NUS Medicine.
Photo: Gary Todd / Wikimedia Commons (CC0)
