Fiorella Rafael remembers feeling stiff at the end of every day in her old office job. “That lack of movement would creep up and compound over the week,” she says. Though standing and walking meetings were encouraged, with deadlines to meet it wasn’t always tenable. “It’s partly what drove me to become a pilates instructor,” she says.
Now Rafael teaches pilates at Sydney’s Scout Studios, where she meets people like me who spend far too much time sitting. According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, 46.9% of Australian adults described their jobs as mostly sitting down, which might explain why only 22.4% of Australian adults met the physical activity guidelines in 2022. In England, one in four do less than 30 minutes of exercise a week, and in the US only about half of the adult population is meeting the guidelines of at least 150 minutes of moderate-intensity exercise or 75 minutes of vigorous exercise a week. Worldwide, that’s nearly 1.8 billion people, says the World Health Organization.
