02/28/2018

There’s a Better Way to Use a Standing Desk

Is standing actually better than sitting?

There’s always that one person in the office—you know the one. The one with the standing desk. Whenever you happen to pass their cube you think, wow, there’s a person being proactive about their health. There’s someone fighting the good fight against modern society’s unavoidably sedentary lifestyle. Good on them, bad on me.

But is that really true? A growing body of evidence suggests that, yes, sitting for long periods of time can have a detrimental effect on your health. But, unfortunately, standing for large spans of the day isn’t that great, either. And a recent study adds to this pile. This month in the journal Ergonomics, researchers report that when they had 20 participants stand for two hours at a time, subjects showed an apparent increase in lower limb swelling and decreased mental state.

Twenty participants is a pretty small study. When conducting research, having a large number of people to analyze is always better. With so many variables at play, a bigger group helps eliminate anything that might be influencing the results. For example, those who might have a genetic predisposition for leg pain or chronic back pain might be particularly susceptible to the effects of sitting and standing. When you only have a small number of people in the study, having a disproportionate number of people with those predispositions could really sway the results. The bigger and more randomly selected your group is, the more likely you are to get something close to a representative sample of the whole population. So, generally speaking, we wouldn't recommend taking the findings of any study with just 20 participants as gospel.

Please select this link to read the complete article from Popular Science.