Physicians, physical therapists and other medical professionals are suggesting that, if you’re going to be working from home, you consider a stand-up desk for your work.
Regardless of whether you were already working from home or are a new work-at-home employee due to coronavirus work-from-home directives, you should consider equipping your home office with a standing desk.
You can use your standing desk for work as well as for leisure activities such as watching TV and playing at the Easybet online casino. Experts say that standing desks benefit the user in a number of ways.
Standing Desks
A stand up desk, also called a standing desk, is basically a desk that is set at a level that allows you to do all of your work while standing. The desk is adjustable so you can change the height of the desk to a level that suits your personal need. Users say that, after a period of adjustment, they find a standing desk to be more comfortable and more convenient. Many users also report that they’re more productive when they use a stand-up desk.
Medical experts say that, at the very least, this type of desk can help to negate the harmful effects of sitting for too long. Some of the effects of using a standing desk for your work include
Reduces Weight Gain
You gain weight when you take in more calories than you burn. Conversely, when you burn more calories than you take in, you lose weight. One way to burn calories is to exercise but it turns out that standing instead of sitting is also helpful in burning calories.
In fact, one study has shown that over the course of an afternoon’s work, standing instead of sitting burns an additional 170 calories. Multiply that by 5 work days and that’s close to 1000 extra burned calories that disappear because you stood while you worked.
Desk jobs have been shown to be associated with obesity and metabolic disease so replacing some of that time at a sitting desk with time at a standing desk may help keep your weight under control.
Heart Disease
Using a stand-up desk may help lower your risk of heart disease. This observation is based on a theory that was first proposed in 1953, when it was noted that bus conductors who stood all day had half the risk of heart disease related deaths as the drivers who sat throughout the day.
Sedentary drivers’ risk increased at a rate of 147%. A study done on this issue at the Department of Internal Medicine, Maastricht University Medical Centre in Maastricht, the Netherlands has determined that even an hour of intense exercise may not make up for the negative effects of an entire day spent sitting.
Back Pain
Back discomfort of one level or another is known to almost everyone who sits at a desk for a long period of time. Several studies have been done to determine if standing desks can improve this.
Standing Desks Appear to Reduce Back Pain
Back pain is one of the most common complaints of office workers who sit all day. To determine if standing desks could improve this, several studies have been done on employees with long-term back pain.
One study, conducted at the Baker IDI Heart and Diabetes Institute in Melbourne, Victoria determined that participants report a 32% improvement in lower back pain after several weeks of using a stand-up desk.
Another study, conducted by the Center for Disease Control in America, determined that use of a sit-stand desk reduced neck and upper back pain by 54% after only 4 weeks of use.
Blood Sugar Levels
Using a standing desk may lower blood sugar levels. Generally speaking, the more your blood sugar levels increase after meals, the worse it is for your health.
In a study done at the Department of Clinical Sciences and Nutrition at the University of Chester in Cheshire, UK, researchers found that office workers who stood for 180 minutes after lunch reduced the associated blood sugar spike by 43% as compared to workers who sat for the same amount of time.
The study was controlled to account for number of steps taken so it was clear that the difference was due to standing, rather than sitting, during the same amount of time.
Another study, conducted at the Baker IDI Heart and Diabetes Institute in Melbourne, Victoria, found that alternating between sitting and standing throughout the workday reduced blood sugar spikes by 11.1% on average.
In the study, the test subjects alternated between sitting and standing every 30 minutes. Researchers theorized that the harmful effects of sitting after meals could help explain why there’s a 112% greater risk of type 2 diabetes linked to excessive sedentary time.
Productivity
Some employers are concerned that stand up desks hinder productivity. The research, however, shows that that does not play out in the long run.
Standing desks don’t appear to have any significant impact on productivity after the worker becomes used to standing at work.
Two studies, one conducted at the Institut für Arbeits-, Sozial- und Umweltmedizin in Mainz, Germany and the other at the Department of Applied Human Sciences of the Human Performance and Health Research Laboratory at the University of Prince Edward Island in Charlottetown, Canada showed that using a standing desk for 4 hours every day had no impact on general office tasks including the number of characters that the worker typed per minute or the number of typing errors.
Since using a standing desk boosts energy and mood, its use is likely to boost productivity rather than hinder it.
Energy Levels and Moods
Stand up desks appear to have a positive influence on the worker’s overall well-being. The Take-a-Stand Project reported that a 7 week study showed that participants who use a standing desk report less fatigue and stress than those who are seated throughout the day. 87% of the workers who used a standing desks reported feeling more energetic throughout the day.
Lifespan
A review of 18 studies that examined, in various ways, the link between early death and increased sitting time found that the more an individual sits, the more likely s/he is to die early.
At the Pennington Biomedical Research Center at the Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, researchers determined that those who sit the most are at a 49% greater risk of dying early than those who sit the least.
A second Pennington Biomedical Research Center study estimated that individuals who reduce their sitting time to 3 hours per day boost their life expectancy by 2 years. Neither study definitively proves cause and effect, but the weight of evidence indicates that more standing can increase our lifespan.
It’s important to note that it’s recommended that anyone who wants to work at a standing desk plan their day so that work time is evenly split between standing and sitting.
Leave a Reply