Recently, at my company there’s been some wave of change (or movement if I may) when one person after another have requested to change their work desks from sitting desks to standing desks. It’s happened quite frequently that now somewhere in the on-boarding process for new comers, there’re questions regarding ergonomics, and one of which is whether the new employees prefer having regular (sitting) desks or a standing ones.
That’s not all. Lately, whenever I check my Facebook, I see an ad for Varidesk, advertized as an add-on product of regular desk and could be attached to regular desk to turn it to a standing desk.
Since most if not all of my posts here aim at helping people to alleviate pain and prevent it whenever possible, I decided to look into this new but not new change in the way we sit or stand to work. Is standing to work really beneficial?
Sitting vs. Standing at Work
Although research has linked sitting for long periods with health problems, including obesity, increased blood pressure, high blood sugar, and abnormal cholesterol levels etc., different reports done by Cornell University, and UCLA show that there’re no clear benefits of static standing vs. static sitting at work. What’s always recommended by these reports is that we should take a posture break and move around for a couple of minutes after staying in one posture for a while. Simply standing (or sitting) is insufficient; the key is to choose the right posture for your work and remember to move around every 30 minutes or so.
Ergonomic Desks
The above-mentioned reports go on and state that ideally, companies should provide their employees with workstations and job tasks that allow frequent changes of working posture, including sitting, standing, and walking. If either sitting or standing is feasible but only one possible, sitting in a properly designed chair is preferable.
With this in mind, having an adjustable desk that lets you sit or stand to work at the same time seems like the best option.
Varidesk – Height-Adjustable Standing Desks and similar products do offer the benefits of letting you choose the posture that you feel most comfortable to work whether it’s standing, or sitting or both. Varidesk offers different product options, but most products are provided as add-on to your current/regular sitting desk, so you don’t need to buy a whole new desk, but rather buy only an add-on to place on top of your desk.
Not sure about other type of desks but setting up a Varidesk in your home/office is a pretty easy job that can be completed with ease in minutes because the desk comes fully assembled and simply needs to be removed from the box and positioned on your desk. Although it’s easy, it should be a two-person job with the all the lifting and carrying.
This ergonomic desk receives very high ranking and positive reviews from thousands of users, so check it out yourself and let me know how it goes.
My company installed/changed the desk for me using its vendor at work, but I myself have bought an ergonomic stand up desk from Amazon with a different brand name, not Veridesk, and I can say it feels liberating to have the option of standing or sitting to work whenever we want to. Not sure about productivity, but I do think the stand-up desk does help with my posture, overall fitness.
This desk looks promising. I’ll try it. Hopefully, this will help with my shoulder pain / stiffness, now that I’ll be able to adjust the desk height and can also move around more freely.
By the way, I’ve also seen Varidesk’s ads quite often on facebook.
I’ve got to say standing desk is the way to go. I’ve been using it for a month now and never look back. I always tried to balance the time between standing and sitting though – not standing all the time to relieve the foot from tiring.