The research is clear: sedentary lifestyles and sitting may well lead to heart disease. Standing desks have advantages, but we can concentrate on the wrong issue.
Instead of spending all day looking at a computer screen, it would definitely be easier to get up (while staring at a computer screen). This is a reasonable assumption: it definitely takes more time and additional calories to stand standing rather than sitting, and those extra calories will add up to something important over a span of days or weeks. But is it true that one of a standing desk’s advantages is that it will help you stop adding weight or even losing excess weight?
- Research participants burned 80 calories per hour while sitting, around the same as texting or watching TV.
- The amount of calories burned when standing was just marginally higher than while seated, around 88 calories per hour.
- 210 calories/hour is burned from walking.
In other words, the use of a standing desk burns an average 24 calories every three hours, around the same amount of calories in a carrot. But during your lunch break, walking for just half an hour could burn an additional 100 calories per day.
And that has been repeatedly proven by the study that has occurred since: a survey published on 800,000 persons in the UK in 2012, for example, showed that those who sat for the longest stretches of time were twice more at risk of asthma, cardiac failure and early death.
Replacing 30 minutes of sitting time with moderate physical exercise such as walking could decrease the likelihood of early death by 17 percent and, if supplemented with higher intensity activity, by up to 35 percent.
And warning entrepreneurs were keen to hop on a business opportunity to build the heavily hyped sit-stand desk, which is expected to serve a demand of $2.8 billion in 2025.
With the exception of sit-down desks, although they can ease muscle tension, it may not do much for your heart. Peter Smith, senior public health scientist at the University of Toronto’s Institute of Medical Science, states that standing for a few extra hours at work does not take enough energy to minimize cardiovascular risk dramatically. “If you had to stand for an hour instead of sitting, you’d have to burn 9 extra calories,” he says. So, you’d have to stand for an additional six hours to burn the calories from a piece of bread. And that will place you at risk for other diseases like heart failure by standing for too long.
Therefore, alternatives like the sit-stand desk do not decrease the risk of heart attack for staff who sit all day. And most specifically, like the inundation of recommendations delivered by health organizations addressing sedentariness in the workplace has missed this point.
It is much healthier to exercise and burns more calories than sitting working at your desk. To balance the long sitting sessions with a brisk stroll to disrupt the rhythm and momentum, appears to be the perfect mix.
Although you may assume that sitting is sitting, there are many explanations why watching TV on your sofa is even worse.
Sitting is responsible for raising the risk of diabetes and obesity, as well as heart disease and cancer. Health recommendations recommend that we can expend moderate exercise for 150 minutes a week, but plenty of us sit down for more than half the working day. Email ensures that we don’t even have to stand up to speak to someone. But it’s not shocking that the demand has a void.
Although the recent research shows that it is unlikely that a standing desk can assist with weight loss or discourage weight gain, a standing desk may have other advantages. Standing desk supporters point to evidence demonstrating that blood sugar levels return to normal quicker after a meal on days that a person spends more time standing.
If you want a standing desk but find it too expensive, you can make your own diy standing desk so there is no reason not to get one.
