Sitting Less is Best but Where Do We Stand When it Comes to Standing Desks?

Take a Stand-Swap between Standing & Sitting while Working

Cashiers at Work Almost Never Get the Opportunity to Sit

It was all in the news sometime back that sitting continuously for hours together is bad for health, it might lead to increase in obesity rates and buildup of visceral fat around internal body organs (visceral fat is dangerous as it raises risk of cardiovascular disease and diabetes). There were suggestions and recommendations to include more time moving around between work, holding walking meetings or using standing desks. Read more about walking meetings and how they improve employee performance at www.firsteatright.com. Bigger companies implemented these changes immediately (employee welfare is their first priority isn’t it?) fixing standing desks for their employees or setting up standing workstations where those interested can go and work. Even I was about to buy a standing desk for myself considering all the advantages involved. Call it luck or bad luck, before I invested my money in one there is another news proclaiming that standing desks might be bad for health after all! All my hopes are shattered and am again left at where I started- sitting!
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Sitting Less at your Desk is Best
One is definitely aware of the ill-effects of sitting down continuously but what about cashiers at super markets, salespersons at garment stores, chefs and bearers at restaurants and our beloved teachers at school? Do they remain fitter than the rest of the population owing to the nature of their job or are they too at the mercy of certain health problems?

Its been proclaimed that standing in between your sitting sessions clears your mind, helps you think clearer and also acts better for your health. But the latest study shows that standing desks might not be as good as we had imagined. In fact, they deteriorate our health further.

Standing Study that Shows Side Effects
A new study conducted by researchers found that adults who stood for more than 2 hours while working were subjected to additional discomfort and decreased mental state. The team monitored 20 adults on their cognitive skills and body comfort while they worked and found that:

• While their problem-solving skills increased all of them experienced a decline in their mental reaction time
• All participants reported a 47% increase in discomfort across all body regions, especially in their lower back and lower limbs.
• Lower limbs and veins showed signs of swelling in some participants
  
  

Yet another study that dug into the lives of those people who often stood at work concluded after its exhaustive research on 7,000 participants that people who stood more at work were two times likelier to develop heart disease in comparison to those who were doing desk jobs. Its due to the blood that pools in your legs, the pressure on the body to pump up blood from the legs up to the heart and the oxidative stress that chances of heart disease increase multi-folds.

Don’t Stand & Don’t Sit
If standing is not the alternative to sitting and if sitting is not the alternative to standing then what is the solution or is there a solution? Yes. People who sit for a long time can move around every now and then or at least vary their position every hour or so. For people who stand, it is advisable to allow them to sit every now and then alternating between sitting and standing.

Don’t come to any hasty conclusions about standing or sitting as the research on standing involved only 20 people and we need much more authentication before drawing conclusions. Until then, it does no harm to stand in between and work. This helps you focus more, feel less restless and avoid the sleepy sessions that might show their heads every afternoon post lunch. It does seem weird to stand and work initially (as though it’s a punishment of some sort) but you get used to it in course of time and it makes you feel much relaxed and energetic.

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