There has been a lot of hype in the news about standing desks is this all true should we all be rushing out to get standing desks? Let’s explore whether a standing desk is a good idea and more specifically if a standing desk would be a good idea for you. We are going to try to explore the different possibilities and see if the change is worth it for you.
The positives for a standing desk are:
“If you want to put that into activity levels,” Dr Buckley says, “then that would be the equivalent of running about 10 marathons a year. Just by standing up three or four hours in your day at work (3)
On the negative side:
Varicose veins are 44% more likely
In Conclusion
There are a lot of benefits to a standing desk but: you are more likely to get tired, and varicose veins and back ache so my advice would be to try to do a temporary standing desk.
Alternatively the newest invention seems to be sit/stand desks where you can achieve the best of both worlds, prices are coming down from the thousands that they were originally and now there are portable ones as well as more reasonably priced ones like Ikea see below.
Image taken from for full article see below:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2805820/Stand-deliver-Ikea-reveals-500-convertible-standing-desk-normal-desk-touch-button.html
(1)Breaks in sedentary time: beneficial associations with metabolic risk.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18252901
(2)Sedentary behaviour and life expectancy in the USA: a cause-deleted life table analysis
http://www.bmjopen.bmj.com/content/2/4/e000828.full?sid=18f9fc6f-a73e-4674-becf-230ec5b827ad
(3) http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-24532996