Although height-adjustable desks keep growing in popularity in office settings, it’s still unclear just how beneficial they are to office workers, according to a new review of existing research which looked at some 9,000 studies and identified just five that compared workers who used height-adjustable desks to those who didn’t. Garry Tew, a research fellow at UK’s University of York who led the study, said that there’s little good evidence that the reductions in sitting time resulted in health benefits, such as reduced weight and reduced cardiovascular risk.
The “problem” with all five studies is that they were conducted on small groups, involving at most 44 people, and all might have been biased in favor of finding benefits.
Standing instead of sitting should deliver some benefits, though it’s unclear what kind of benefits we’re talking about here.Nevertheless, it has been proven that sitting for long periods of time increases risk for heart disease, diabetes, cancer and early death, even among people who exercise regularly. Yet employees in administrative and managerial occupations often sit for more than three-quarters of their total time at work, the study authors note.
So standing instead of sitting should deliver some benefits, though it’s unclear — thus hard to quantify — what kind of benefits we’re talking about here.
“In my opinion, standing is probably only marginally better than sitting, and… moderate-to-vigorous purposeful exercise is a much better strategy for improving general fitness and health,” Tew said. “So, with all other aspects of lifestyle remaining unchanged, installing a height adjustable workstation will likely have minimal effects on important health outcomes and is highly unlikely to be an effective weight loss promotion strategy.”
One thing that standing desks bring to the “table” is that they allow workers to change posture regularly, and that may help avoid musculoskeletal problems from prolonged sitting. That benefit alone could help drive the growth of the standing desk market…
[Via: VentureBeat]