Desks that allow you to switch from a sitting position to a standing position are quite popular. Is sitting or standing better? That’s going to depend on the amount of time you are standing and your posture while sitting. “Long-term muscle fatigue caused by standing for long periods of time has not received much attention,” said María Gabriela García, a researcher who co-authored a paper on the ill effects of standing for prolonged periods of time.
And wait just when you think that was the choice there’s the leaning desk. When you can’t stand to sit and don’t want to stand, don’t lean in — lean back. That’s the chill idea behind LeanChair, a new portable reclining desk and chair combo that aims to take the pain out of standing while you work. Now you can slouch like you mean it. Think of it as a standing chair of sorts, a creature comfort contraption to lay your weary bones against, like an upright stretcher. You lean back on LeanChair’s padded backrest at a slight angle in a standing position, but you’re not quite fully standing, so it takes a load off your feet, literally.
As the war over whether to sit or to stand churns ever onwards, with each new report seemingly refuting previous research, make sure that when you are sitting, you’re sitting correctly. For example, your elbows should be at a 90 degree angle when you are seated at a desk and your eyes should naturally focus on the upper third of the monitor. For more tips, check out the infographic generated by the healthcare marketing and ad agency Omnicore.
We sit to commute. Sit at our computers. Sit at meetings. Relax…by sitting at home. In North America, most adults sit for about 9.3 hours. And that’s bad news for our health. When we sit for long periods, circulation is constricted. Metabolism slows. Muscles shut off; connective tissue tightens. Our brain hungers for blood and nutrients that are barely slugging through our system. Our body engine is set to “idle”, neutral, or even worse — switched off.
Well, throughout the health and ergonomic world, experts have proposed:
Sitting on an exercise ball rather than a chair.
Working at a standing desk rather than sitting.
Using a treadmill while working at a standing desk.
Breaking up sitting with movement at regular intervals.
The biggest problem with sitting down all day: It’s uncomfortable. Sore backs. Stiff necks. Aching shoulders. Throbbing knees. (In fact, the prolonged contact between femur and patella that can cause chronic knee pain is often called “moviegoer’s knee”.) If we’re at a computer, we slouch. Lean in further towards the screen. Round our shoulders forward. Crane our necks. Squint. Tense our facial muscles. And like the loyal suspension bridges they are, our backs try to compensate valiantly. In as little as an hour of sitting, our backs can measurably stiffen.
Key point: “Uninterrupted sedentary time” is strongly associated with “cardio-metabolic and inflammatory risk biomarkers” — regardless of age, gender or ethnicity. In other words, sitting sucks. For everyone. And if we sat less, we would be leaner, healthier people. Sitting: as bad as smoking? Indeed, a study that looked at 105 full-time office workers showed that those who sat longer were about three times as likely to have a waist circumference larger than 94cm (37 inches) for men or 80cm (31 inches) for women. Waist circumference, as you probably know, is strongly associated with cardio-metabolic risk. These same workers were also nine times more likely to have a BMI greater than 30, which in technical terms would make them obese. Meanwhile, another study showed that each additional hour of sitting led to larger waist circumferences, as well as higher insulin and lower HDL cholesterol. Not good. In fact, the evidence against prolonged sitting is so strong that one paper asks if chronic sitting, in itself, ought to be considered a “distinct coronary heart disease risk factor”. That’s putting prolonged sitting in the same category as smoking. Given these correlations, the comparison may not be surprising.
If sitting sucks regardless of the throne we choose, is standing any better? One study suggests that computer users who spend as little as one hour a day on their feet at work have less back pain.
Interestingly, data entry speed went down when standing, but not by a lot. By the way, these tests were performed with people who had not practiced standing desk work. With practice, they’d probably get better at it. So, when it comes to aches and pains, standing may be a good alternative to sitting. But will people actually use the option to stand if it’s available? It appears they will. A Swedish call center with over one hundred employees adopted sit-stand desks and found that people stood more and sat less.
A recently reported Australian study explored the same issue. With electronically or manually adjustable sit-stand desks available, sitting time at work went from 85% at start to 60% by the time the study ended. Interestingly, participants were motivated to give the desks a try, either because of their own “dodgy backs” or because they’d heard they could burn more calories standing up.
Other studies have looked at the effects of sit-stand desks on metabolic markers of health and disease, and found that short bouts of light to moderate intensity walking lowered post-meal glucose and insulin levels in overweight and obese adults. Standing burns about 1.36 Kcals per minute more than sitting. That’s more than sixty calories an hour. Multiplied by eight (the hours in a typical work day) and you’re talking about 500 calories or more a day.
If you’re looking to lose weight or simply stay lean, get out of your chair ASAP. Movement is good for us — for everything about us. And lack of movement leads to disease.
Sitting all day is just bad for us as human beings. A ball chair, or a better chair, or a stand-up desk are all better than nothing. But let’s push this a step further. Let’s look for different ways of working that will let us perform at our best. Let’s move more often throughout our days. Let the juices flow. And then, sit (briefly) when it suits us — perhaps for contemplation, or deep concentration. Go on errands. Use the bathroom one floor up. Pop over to another building to get something or meet someone. Brainstorm or plan standing up. Use a whiteboard or a flipchart instead of a pen and paper. Or spread some sheets of paper out on the floor and squat down to organize them. Sit when it’s best to sit. Move when it’s best to move. Figure out how to make rote tasks more active, and how to make intensely cognitive tasks more focused. Experiment to find out what works for you, and remember that combining movement with work improves with practice. Don’t leap on your treadmill desk at 4 mph and try to knock out your PhD thesis. Try just standing up for a little while first.
Take regular movement breaks. Set a timer. Every hour, stand up, stretch, walk around for a few minutes. Allude vaguely to a smoking habit or back injury, and get your coworkers accustomed to you popping out for some fresh air, or standing up in meetings (you can easily lean unobtrusively against a wall). Have walking meetings. Outside if possible. Your coworkers will probably appreciate the break too. Walk and talk. When you take a phone call, stand up or go for a stroll.
Improving ergonomics with better chairs or workstations is a great start, and an easy way to make a small, immediate, manageable change. But simply adapting ourselves to how we think “work should get done” isn’t enough. We need to go further, for our own health. For optimal human performance along with creativity, innovation, and quality of life, we need to adapt the environment to our actual needs.
Humans need to move. So let’s get going.
