The standing desk is often touted, especially for office workers, as the panacea to our sedentary lifestyles.
However, a recent study has found standing for long periods might not be much better than sitting.
Lead author at the University of Sydney’s Faculty of Medicine and Health and deputy director of the Charles Perkins Centre’s Mackenzie Wearables Research Hub, Dr Matthew Ahmadi, told Sunday Morning’s Jim Mora there were other ways for those with a sedentary lifestyle to improve their cardiovascular health.
“Standing is certainly better than sitting, but standing by itself will not necessarily lower your risk for heart disease,” Ahmadi said.
“To do that, we will need to mix in other forms of activity that gets the body moving.”
Ahmadi’s team recently published a study examining 100,000 participants who wore a smartwatch-like accelerometer on their wrist for a week using data from the UK Biobank.
His team followed them up for around eight years to document their hospitalisations and risk of mortality due to heart disease and circulatory conditions.
Not only were the health benefits of standing desk overblown, but their research also found that long periods of standing still may increase the risk for certain types of circulatory conditions, such as varicose veins or deep vein thrombosis, due to blood pooling in the lower part of the body.
Their findings buck previous research that has touted the benefits of standing over sitting.
Ahmadi said this was because most past research only looked at short-term changes or “soft endpoints” such as improved blood pressure and insulin sensitivity.
Ahmadi’s team however took a long-term view.
“What we found was [that], when we looked at the risk of hospitalisation … standing by itself didn’t lower the risk for these diseases.”
To improve cardiovascular health, standing wasn’t enough, you needed to get the body moving, he said.
“That’s typically done most efficiently through activity that gets us moving, like ambulation and walking.
“These activities don’t have to necessarily be going to the gym and doing exercise for 60 minutes every day.
“We can accumulate improved cardiovascular health just from doing our day-to-day activities, and this can be such as household chores or even gardening outdoors.
“Anything that gets us moving, gets us out and about.”
