Home > Lifestyle

Are Standing Desks Better for Your Health?

By Miguel Leiva-Gomez

Ever since the Internet has become such a juicy place, people have been sitting at their computers a lot more than they used to. The rise in proportion to office jobs means that a large section of the population is spending at least a third of their day sitting down at a desk. We’re standing up and going outside less and less. Regardless of what your opinion about this is, sitting down for extended periods of time isn’t exactly the best thing to do to your body. This is why some folks decided to purchase standing desks, which simply are desks that are usable only when standing up. The question we must ask ourselves now is: are these any better?

The Rationale

standingdesk-adjustable

Sitting down for extended periods of time has been known to be the cause of varicose veins, pulmonary embolisms, and heart disease. Basically, if you’re at your computer all day, expect to live a much shorter lifespan than the outdoorsy folks who go jogging every once in awhile.

To battle against the effects of sitting down, some innovators have cooked up a concept known as the standing desk. The marketing behind such a desk says that they’re designed so that you can regulate how much you stand up and sit down, preventing all the ugly diseases that come with just sitting down. Standing up burns more calories (since you’re supporting your weight on your legs) and promotes a healthier blood flow (especially if the chair you’ve been sitting on has sharp edges).

But are these claims completely accurate? Let’s have a look at how standing up for extended periods of time might hurt you.

Standing Up Also Causes Varicose Veins

If you’re looking to avoid spider veins crawling up your leg, apparently standing up for several hours isn’t going to solve it. Even if the desk you purchase has an adjustable height, are you really going to bother adjusting the height every hour or so? The linked-to study from Cornell University also states that standing desks don’t really help your posture either. You must adjust your posture to be able to lean in towards the screen. Because you are leaning from a standing position, this puts more strain on you than it would from a sitting position.

Wrist extension is also an issue, leading to poor wrist posture and eventually a heightened risk for carpal tunnel syndrome (yes, more than you would if you were sitting). The people that the university studied have shown that sit-stand desks are generally not used for more than 15 minutes per day in a standing position. Standing position use declines sharply from the first day, with people eventually abandoning the entire standing concept after one month.

It Takes You Longer to Get Work Done

standingdesk-treadmill

Standing for an extended period time also throws off your fine motor capabilities. Since it reduces productivity, it also decreases the value of the work you’re doing (assuming you’re using such a desk at work). All of this happens for just a 20% increase in your caloric consumption. The marketing behind standing desks says that you experience an increase of productivity, which falls flat on its face quite quickly considering the effort required to maintain a standing position for a prolonged period of time.

So, What do You Do?

The study at Cornell University regarding standing and sitting that I linked to earlier sums up nicely what you should do to promote a healthier circulatory system: Get up and walk a little every 20 minutes. That’s all you have to do. It’s not very difficult, and more importantly, it doesn’t cost you upwards of $300.

Subscribe to our newsletter!

Our latest tutorials delivered straight to your inbox

Miguel Leiva-Gomez Avatar
Miguel Leiva-Gomez
Miguel has been a business growth and technology expert for more than a decade and has written software for even longer. From his little castle in Romania, he presents cold and analytical perspectives to things that affect the tech world.

Read next

In 2016, archaeologists dated two rings of snapped stalagmites in France’s Bruniquel Cave to 176,500 years ago, evidence that Neanderthals had walked 336 metres into darkness with fire and built architecture deep underground long before modern humans reached Europe
Otto von Bismarck was 74 when Germany adopted the world’s first national old-age social insurance program in 1889, setting the pension age at 70 after years of fighting socialists with bans, laws, and a promise few workers would live long enough to use
When cosmonaut Valeri Polyakov stepped out of his Soyuz capsule in March 1995 after 437 consecutive days aboard Mir, doctors recorded him at several centimetres above his pre-flight height, and his spine had become so unaccustomed to gravity that the recovery team carried him to a chair rather than risk the compression of letting him walk.
A contemplative scene with two scientists in a vintage laboratory setting.
When Harvard astronomer Cecilia Payne submitted her 1925 doctoral thesis arguing that the Sun was made almost entirely of hydrogen, the field’s senior figure Henry Norris Russell talked her into adding a line calling the result ‘almost certainly not real,’ and then published the same conclusion himself four years later to widespread acclaim.
When Edme Mariotte stared at marks on a wall in the 1660s, one mark vanished inside a six-degree hole where the optic nerve leaves the eye and the brain has been filling in wallpaper, sky, and faces ever since
When seismic waves from the Chicxulub impact reached what is now North Dakota roughly ten minutes after the asteroid struck, they appear to have triggered a ten-metre standing wave in an inland river that flung fish onto the bank and buried them under glass beads still falling from the sky.
When survivors near Lake Nyos woke on the morning of 22 August 1986, the cattle were dead in the fields, the birds had fallen out of the trees, and 1,746 of their neighbours were lying where they had stood the night before, with no fire, no flood, and no wound to explain it.
In 1959, a Soviet research team in Novosibirsk began breeding silver foxes for nothing but tameness, and within forty generations the animals had floppy ears, curled tails, piebald coats, and a bark, traits no one had selected for but which appeared on their own once fear was removed.