Modern living--with our TV's, computers and desk jobs--has induced most of us to spend far longer sitting down than standing up. All that sitting can have serious consequences on our health. Recent reports even compare sitting to smoking in terms of the toll it takes on our bodies. WPSU’s Patty Satalia caught up with a few people on Penn State’s University Park campus to see how and why the movement to sit less and stand more is gaining momentum.
Click here to learn about 29 exercises you can do at (or near) your desk.
Learn how to break your sitting habit.
Read about Dr. David Conroy's work at Penn State.
The Movement to Sit Less and Stand More is Gaining Momentum
You might want to stand up for this next report. Recent studies have shown that sitting kills and has been compared to smoking in terms of the toll it takes on our bodies. According to several people on Penn State’s University Park campus, the movement to sit less and stand more is gaining momentum.
“I’ve lost 110 pounds total with health and exercise,” said Chris Divyak, a web developer at Penn State Public Media. “It’s really helped to keep the weight off, and it’s made a huge difference in my life.”
Divyak’s job typically entails sitting in front of a computer for long stretches of the workday. About four years ago, Divyak was searching the Internet for ways to combat chronic back pain and hit upon a surprising solution – standing.
“I just overall feel better,” Divyak said. “I don’t have the lower back pain I used to from sitting all day. I was also looking for a way to help with the lack of exercise from working so much. This was a double-win for me, being able to burn a few extra calories at the office while bettering my posture.”
According to David Conroy, a professor of kinesiology at Penn State, we are able to burn 50 to 100 percent more energy standing than sitting. As part of Conroy’s research on motivation, he’s been investigating why we spend so much time sitting.
“We’ve engineered physical activities out of most of our lives,” Conroy said.
In fact, sitting is the most common waking activity. Many people sit for eight hours or more every day, and prolonged sitting isn’t just hard on our backs. There is a long list of negative health consequences associated with sitting in medical literature.
“If you want to simplify it, we’d say there’s cardiovascular risk and metabolic risk,” Conroy said. “You’re not expending as much energy, so you’re going to end up with dysregulated blood sugar. You’re not forcing your heart to work as hard to circulate oxygen to the muscles, so you’re going to end up with cardiovascular consequences as well.”
Unfortunately, going to the gym cannot undo the harm caused by uninterrupted sitting. Even those who exercise at least an hour each day tend to spend most of the remaining hours of the day in a chair, behind a desk, in a car or in front of the TV.
“We are prompted by our environment,” Conroy said. “When we walk into a room, we see an armchair or a desk with a chair behind it, and we’re prompted to go sit in it.”
Conroy said sitting is a habit, and the more ingrained the habit, the harder it is to break.
“Come up with some plan for an alternative behavior that will keep you out of that chair,” Conroy advised. “Read while standing or take a walk in the neighborhood – but you have to link it to that clue. So when you get home and see that chair in the living room, it’s going to remind you that you need to do this alternative behavior instead of the well learned habitual behavior.”
Divyak also recognizes the importance of forming a daily habit.
“It took me a good two or three months before I was really comfortable standing all day,” he said. “I tried it for one or two hours at a time, then sat for an hour or two. If you try to do all eight hours at once, it’s really hard on your joints.”
While it works for Divyak, standing all day won’t work for everyone, and may not even be necessary. Conroy said even little changes can make a big difference, and in the end may be more practical.
“Five or six minutes every hour seems like a manageable amount of time,” Conroy said. “If you break it down to two or three minutes every half hour that doesn’t interrupt the flow of things too much. If you wait until the end of the day and try to stand from 7 p.m. on, that becomes a little bit overwhelming.”
There is no magic number as to when sitting becomes hazardous. Instead, it’s just best to adapt the mindset that less is better.
“We don’t know at what point it becomes too much,” Conroy said. “The studies that have been done break the population into groups of people who sit more and less, basically, to make their comparisons. We know that sitting eight or more hours a day is associated with greater health risks than sitting less than four hours a day.”
Ben Tolton, a data analyst for purchasing services at Penn State, and an avid runner, adopted a unique alternative to sitting more than two years ago. He created his first standing desk, improvising with items he purchased at the university’s resale store called Lion Surplus.
“They had trays on wheels that slide up and down, like the kind you get in a hospital bed,” Tolton said. “I used a tray and put my keyboard on top. All I had to do was stack up a couple monitor stands to get the monitors where they needed to be, and it actually worked quite well.”
Tolton has also tried out a vendor’s top-of-the-line standing desk.
“The actual desktop goes up and down,” Tolton said. “So I don’t even have a keyboard tray. I can actually set the top of the desk to where I want my hands to be. My favorite part is the universal monitor. It is infinitely adjustable depending on whether you stand or sit. It’s very simple – it’s just a tabletop that moves up and down.”
When co-workers questioned Tolton about his setup, which had him alternately standing, then sitting on a big blue yoga ball, he couldn’t help but gush. His posture had improved, the nagging back pain was gone and he felt energized.
“For me, laziness snowballs,” Tolton said. “When I’m active and engaged, I feel like I get more done. I work right up to the clock, and I feel good. I can just walk right out to my car, go home and move onto the next thing. There’s no longer that afternoon lag that I used to feel.”
Conroy said it’s more common these days for people to hold meetings on the go. They’ll walk laps in Rec Hall or across campus to discuss ideas with a colleague or student, and they report feeling more creative when they talk and walk.
“The key is planning,” Conroy said. “Planning is what we can control no matter what environment you’re in. The key is to decide you want to change and then make plans for how you’re going to do it in the context where you want to and where it’s possible.”
Although there is still a lot to learn, the message from a growing body of research is: sit less, live longer.
