Healthy lifestyles can lead to overall better outlooks on life, which definitely hold promise for workplaces where Americans toil away day after day, week after week, month after month, and year after year.
Organizations seem to be always interested in new opportunities to help workers improve their health, with new trends capturing the attention of training and development leaders continually.
Over the last few years, many of us have seen people in the office using a standing desk—a desk that’s raised so the workspace is at a comfortable height for the person to stand instead of sit. The trend has taken off in light of data showing how potentially detrimental a life as a desk jockey can be.
Some Conflicting Data
According to CCN’s, Bethy Squires, data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) shows that Americans on average spend half their day sitting. She also cites data from the Mayo Clinic that says those who sit for 8 hours a day—i.e., the American average—with no physical activity have a similar risk of dying as smokers.
This data has helped prompt the increased interest in standing desks. If sitting is so bad for us, we’ll stand instead. Problem solved, right? Perhaps not …
Squires says that a review of the science promoting standing desks is very lacking. “A 2016 meta-analysis of 20 studies, conducted by the Finnish Institute of Occupational Health and including more than 2,000 participants, found little evidence that standing or treadmill desks have any health benefits,” she says. “Even the best studies they found were poorly designed, with small sample sizes and little to no follow up to see whether standing desks had any real long-term effects.”
Other Options
If sitting is bad and standing may not be so good, what alternatives do working Americans have to boost their health and well-being? The solution may not be so much how we spend our sedentary time, but rather avoiding being sedentary at all, Squires suggests.
Squires notes that health experts suggest moving regularly throughout the day. “Studies have found that an hour of exercise a day can counteract the health dangers of sitting,” she says. “One 2016 study found that a five-minute jog or speed walk every hour improves mood and decreases end-of-the-day food cravings.”
So, if you’re worried about how much time you spend sitting at your desk all day, you might want to rethink that trendy standing desk and try to take a few more quick walks each day.