Don't stand for this nonsense: new study claims standing desks don't have any health benefits

A major new study on standing desks appears to indicate that they are pretty much a waste of time, and essentially miss the point in terms of health benefits.

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Sitting all of the time may not be any worse than standing some of the time, but neither is good for you - get up and move instead (Image Credit: Pixabay)

We're all familiar with the idea of the standing desk, hopefully, which allows for its height to be adjusted.

The basic concept is that sitting all day is very bad for you, and that mixing in some standing time - we should note, the idea is to mix sitting and standing, not do the latter all the time - is good for you.

And yes, sitting all day is indeed bad for you - very bad - but standing for over two hours of the day, mixing up your sitting and standing, doesn't help meaningfully, at least not in terms of mitigating cardiovascular risks.

The large study of 83,000 adults (highlighted by The Washington Post), entitled 'device-measured stationary behavior and cardiovascular and orthostatic circulatory disease incidence,' found that people who sat for a total of over 10 hours per day (most folks) were 13% more likely to have developed serious heart problems (the study looked at participants over the course of seven years). Those people also had a 26% greater risk of developing a circulatory disorder.

However, standing for part of the day didn't make a lot of difference, with people who stood for over two hours per day having an 11% increased risk of circulatory problems. Those who stood for two hours didn't have any lower risk of severe heart problems than those who sat for 10+ hours (though they didn't have a greater risk, either).

In short, there wasn't any meaningful difference between those who sat all the time, and those who sat and stood in combination. Matthew N. Ahmadi, a research fellow at the University of Sydney, Australia, who headed up the study, observed "there was no improvement" in heart health associated with standing. "What our research and other literature suggest is that both sitting and standing are part of the problem of physical inactivity," Ahmadi said.

In other words, both are two sides of the same sedentary coin, admittedly with some differences between them, but the upshot is a similarly negative outcome.

A moving story

What you need to do, then, is move. Ahmadi tells us: "To improve your overall health and lower your risk of heart disease, you have to mix in actual movement."

In other words, get up from your desk every hour (or perhaps a bit more regularly), and go for a walk. If not outside, then at least around the house for a few minutes, or maybe up and down the stairs a bit.

It'll give your eyes a nice break from your monitor, too. (While we're talking desk job health, don't forget the 20-20-20 rule either: look away from your monitor every 20 minutes, at an object over 20 feet away, for 20 seconds, to ensure your eyes don't get overly fatigued by staring at a close - arm's length way, we hope - screen constantly).

Emmanuel Stamatakis, a professor at the University of Sydney who oversaw the study, further notes that standing doesn't involve much in the way of muscular contractions, informing us that "muscular contraction is a necessary condition for any activity to maintain or improve health."

Indeed, standing could mean your blood pooling in your legs, which can cause problems of its own - and that's why you're certainly not advised to be standing all day, if you can avoid it. As it's really no better than sitting all day, and neither, apparently, is mixing the two, at least for heart health. You need to combine sitting with movement, quite simply, the study insists - and that makes some sense to us.