Take a stand at the office

Stand for it: not sitting down all day has health benefits
10 April 2012

Just try standing up for a day at work. You will ache at first and long to sit down. But give it a few days.

By the end of a week, you should be able to stand for several hours at a stretch. After a few weeks your waist should shrink, your mental alertness increase and your overall physical health will flourish, according to medical researchers.

Churchill won the war standing at a lectern all day. Ernest Hemingway wrote standing up, as does Philip Roth. Donald Rumsfeld, the former US defence secretary, launched the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan from his raised desk at the Pentagon. Now demand for lecterns, or desks which can be raised and lowered, is rising as more and more people crave the mental and physical benefits of working standing up.

The logic is that it is far better to engage your muscles while you work than to slouch in a chair.

A 2010 article in the British Journal of Sports Medicine reported that people who sit all day have a much higher risk of disease than those who move about. Even something so simple as getting up and stretching every half hour, or walking to the coffee machine, can dramatically improve your wellbeing.

The American Cancer Society has reported that sitting all day undermines the effect of exercise.

Another American medical journal found that sitting for more than six hours a day raises your chances of dying from heart disease and obesity by 18 per cent. Sitting appears to slow your metabolism down to the point where your muscles cease to work effectively.

Americans are taking this so seriously that technology companies like AOL have around 15 per cent of their staff working at stand-up desks, and the federal government is placing large orders for them in the hope of increasing the efficiency of its staff. Serious amateur athletes now talk of the "chair of death" and all the tight hip flexors and "dormant glutes" which arise from a day of sitting down.

As with any health trend, there are sceptics. Some occupational health experts argue that standing all day raises the risk of varicose veins, puts pressure on the spinal discs and a greater burden on your circulation.

For the extremists, though, even standing isn't enough: there is the treadmill desk, which allows you to walk or run while working.

A middle ground has been found by observers of
behaviour in offices with both ordinary and standing desks. They have noticed that people stand when they need to get something done, or engage in a creative task. Standing liberates people. They bounce on their feet as ideas come to them. Sitting is for when you are engaged with more passive activities such as doing paperwork or making telephone calls.

The next stop for research into this area is schools. Children who have trouble sitting still may be better off standing up, or at the very least, given a licence to fidget.

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