Standing desks have actually been fashionable for over a years, due in big part to their claims of increased health for those people who utilize a computer system for hours every day. A brand-new research study with years of information and 10s of countless individuals tosses cold water on those claims, recommending that standing desks aren’t assisting with some core illness.
In the December 2024 concern of the International Journal of Epidemiology, a group of scientists released a research study with information from over 83,000 individuals in the United Kingdom who had actually blended both sitting and meaning work. They discovered that “fixed time” increased circulatory system illness threat.
Sitting for more than 10 hours a day throughout a prolonged amount of time was related to a 13 percent boost in heart issues over 7 years and 26 percent higher occurrence of circulatory conditions. The longer individuals stayed fixed, the higher the danger (as determined by an increased typical heart rate). The push to get individuals to occasionally stand at a desk rather of sitting in a chair.
The more worrying information is that time invested representing the very same fixed jobs didn’t considerably lower those dangers. Standing still for hours and hours as an option to sitting came with measurably greater threats for orthostatic circulatory illness, consisting of “orthostatic hypotension, varicose vein, persistent venous deficiency, and venous ulcers.” Once again, this isn’t stunning– medical professionals have actually understood that standing still for long hours for work, duplicated throughout weeks, months, and years, has some naturally bad results.
The report is quite thick, academically. (The Washington Post has a story summing up the findings, however it’s regretfully behind a paywall.) The worrying takeaway is that those who represented 2 hours a day, in addition to being in primarily inactive job, didn’t significantly reduce their threat for circulatory concerns. In layperson’s terms: Sitting for a very long time is bad, standing fixed for a very long time is bad, and blending it up isn’t actually going to alter any of that.
The scientists advise more significant motion with a lot of contraction– walking would do it– every 30 minutes to assist prevent both cardiovascular and orthostatic circulatory illness threat.
I’ve handled spinal column problems for the majority of my adult life. Among the most discouraging features of it is that measured research study on the very best things to do is tough to discover. Ergonomics, particularly for computer systems, and particularly in combination with any sort of marketing, typically comes down to “vibes.”
As both a pain in the back patient and a consistent user of standing desks (and other options to standard chairs, like yoga balls), the most helpful conclusion I’ve become that you must merely listen to your body. If your back or shoulders ache after a whole day sitting at a desk, it’s an indicator that something requires to alter. Discover something that works for you … which might or might not be what works for anybody else.