Mikael Cho had heard the rumblings. “Sitting is the new smoking,” experts declared, in response to robust research finding that sitting too much ups your risk of death, even if you exercise regularly.
Cho, who lives in Montreal, didn’t want to be a sitter. So the 31-year-old founder and CEO of Unsplash, an online photo-sharing community, built his own standing desk from Ikea, laid a yoga mat on the floor — and stood.
Thank goodness he didn’t pay more than $22.
“It’s really hard to [work] when you’re thinking about the pain in your leg, when you’re trying to force yourself to stand, when your shoulders are starting to cave in,” he says, when, “what you really want to do is focus on the next paragraph that you’re writing.”
Needless to say, Cho doesn’t use a standing desk anymore.
People in offices across the country and even around the world are taking a stand. According to a 2017 survey out of the Society for Human Resource Management, standing desks are the fastest growing benefits trend; 13 percent of employers provided or subsidized them in 2013; 44 percent did so in 2017. Varidesk, a maker of sit-to-stand desks, has grown from one employee to more than 200 in less than five years, ships to more than 30 countries daily and has more than 1 million users of its products worldwide, according to the company’s CEO, Jason McCann.
It’s easy to see why. One 2014 study in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health found that giving a bunch of desk jockeys adjustable desks — which users can raise when they want to stand and lower when they tire — reduced their sedentary time by more than three hours a week. It also increased their sense of well-being and energy, while decreasing fatigue and appetite. A more recent study found that call center employees with sit-stand desks were almost 50 percent more productive than their colleagues who sat in the office; while other research suggests standing desks can be helpful for weight maintenance.
[See: 8 Ways to Stay Healthy at Work.]
But there are caveats. Namely, you have to be the right kind of person in the right kind of job (Cho wasn’t), and you have to use the furniture in the right kind of way. “The majority of people who get frustrated (and ultimately leave) a standing desk [do so] because they’re not taught how to correctly utilize it,” says Kamron Kunce, a spokesman for the adjustable-height desk company UpDesk.
Are you guilty?
Mistake No. 1: You stand all day.
Standing all day is no better than remaining on your rear end, says Alan Hedge, a professor in the Department of Design and Environment Analysis at Cornell University. “If what you’re doing is replacing sitting with standing, you’re not actually doing your body any favors,” he says. “In fact, you’re introducing a whole variety of new risk factors.”
For example, standing too much can compress the spine and lead to lower back problems over time. It can also boost your risk for varicose veins, deep vein thrombosis and other cardiovascular problems since the heart has to work against gravity to keep blood flowing up from your toes, Hedge says. In fact, a 2017 study in the American Journal of Epidemiology that looked at the health of more than 7,000 people in various professions found that workers who primarily stood on the job had double the risk of heart disease over about a 12-year period than people who mostly sat. “Combinations of sitting and standing are likely to have beneficial cardiovascular health benefits,” the authors concluded.
Indeed, Hedge has found that that the 20:8:2 regimen — or sitting (in a good posture) for 20 minutes, standing for 8 minutes and standing while moving (think gentle stretching or walking) for two minutes — is ideal. “If you go from sitting to standing and vice versa frequently throughout the day … that completely eradicates any of the supposed risk factors associated with sitting, or indeed with standing,” he says.
Mistake No. 2: You stand (or sit) still.
Poor chairs. They’ve become the scapegoat for the dangers of sedentary behavior since most studies look at how much people sit, not how much they don’t move.
“It doesn’t matter if you’re standing or sitting, if you’re doing it statically, your body wasn’t designed that way,” says Ken Tameling, an ergonomic seating expert at the furniture company Steelcase. “You need to move.”
That doesn’t necessarily mean you need a treadmill desk, which some research suggests can hinder learning, attention and typing skills. Rather, find ways to move while you’re sitting and standing. On your feet, for example, use a foot rest to take the weight off of one foot and then the other. On your caboose, try reclining so your legs and torso form a 135-degree angle — the healthiest seated position, Tameling says. (That’s opposed to, say, sitting straight up at a 90-degree angle, or hunching forward.) “It might be making you look like you’re lazy, but you might be coming up with that next big idea.”
Even if you just fidget, “any kind of micro-movement is going to give you some value,” Tameling says. “The worst thing you can do is sit in one posture — basically what you want to do is ignore your first-grade teacher.”
[See: 5 Bodyweight Exercises to Fix Your Posture.]
Mistake No. 3: You use it for the wrong tasks.
There’s a reason why we drive sitting down, why some surgeons perform detailed surgery while seated and why Cho felt less effective as writer when his desk was chest-height: Our brains just perform some tasks — like those that require fine motor skills — better sitting down, Hedge says.
“The brain works by processing things sequentially, so it becomes hard to do multiple things at once,” he says. “The key here is don’t throw everything away because we have really good chairs these days.”
If your job requires longer spurts of concentration, you may also want to avoid alerts that tell you when to sit, stand and move around, since it takes 25 minutes to get back into that focused state after being interrupted, Tameling says.
For that reason, Cho’s found it easiest to work in seated “sprints” of 30 to 90 minutes. “It’s important to stand and sit, and yes, there’s some tools that can probably help you with that,” he says. “But your body does a really good job of telling you” when it’s time to move.
Mistake No. 4: You do it for weight loss.
Using a standing desk as a weight-loss tool is unlikely to tip your scale: One 2017 analysis of 44 studies in the journal Circulation found that trading sitting for standing for six hours a day burns only about 50 more calories. Eat an extra apple (close to 100 calories) and you’ve already overcompensated.
For Cho. the potential calorie burn wasn’t worth the blow to his work and comfort. Plus, incorporating physical activity in other ways can be more effective — and fun. Now, he does squats while waiting for his lunch to microwave, takes 20-minute walks outside and stretches his hips at least daily. “Then I can still focus on my work, even if I’m sitting all the time while I’m working,” he says. “It’s more about the activity.”
[See: 13 Fun Sports That Burn Calories.]
Mistake No. 5: You spent big bucks.
Cho had the right idea when he built a standing desk on the cheap rather than splurging on one that cost upwards of $2,000. “I didn’t want to invest in one … without testing it first,” he says.
But even the $22 Cho dished out is $22 more than you have to spend, since “it doesn’t cost you anything to stand up,” says Hedge, who suggests standing when you’re making phone calls or reading paperwork, since standing while doing computer work still doesn’t give your arms, hands, fingers or eyes a break.
“Before you spend any money,” he says, “try out the obvious simple solution.”
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