I should have put a smiley after the raise your desks bit.
It's not a bad idea though. It's just that there's no solution to the problems caused by prolonged static postures whether they're from sitting or standing.
They actually make a unique line of furniture that features a 3/4 stand stool chair in the middle of everything. It's pretty cool and it's an interesting concept, though I think it's limited in its application.
I didn't mean that we shouldn't use good supportive chairs, just that we should give our muscles a bit of use too. Nor did I mean that you should never slouch, just that sitting up is much easier on a higher stool of some kind than at typical chair height.
Yep, not using your muscles is a huge no-no, but properly designed ergonomic chairs should actually encourage you to use your muscles when you can. Most ergnomic chairs these days are designed to allow you to sit at different points depending on how much support you want.
I have a Zody chair. It's a mesh backed chair with adjustable everything. No chair I've ever tested or owned conforms to your body as must as this chair, yet I only sit in a fully supported position part of the time. The chair's designed to be comfortable for you to sit at mid-point without any back support and also at the forward lip where you start to put weight into your legs.
The forward sitting position is actually one that you can do in any chair You don't need a kneeling, stool, or partial stand chair to accomplish this. Just scoot as far forward in a chair as you can without allowing your pevlic bones to lose solid contact with the seat, keep your back straight, and lean forward a little.
When I stand, I shift my legs around, prop one up, bop and dance around (when no one's looking), am more inclined to walk around and do non-computer related things than if I had been sitting, and generally feel more alert. I very much enjoy taking perching or sitting breaks also.
I don't have the article handy, but I recall a study in which it was found that even people who exercised regularly with reasonable intensity where still more likely to carry some extra body weight if they sat down for long stretches of the day, presumably having to do with a metabolic depression caused by (relative) inactivity. This seems to match my personal experience.
And I could be exhibit B on that myself.
That's a bit different than saying that supported sitting results in significant atrophy of the muscles though. That article you ran into is just taking a logical conclusion one step further. It's pretty well accepted that in general if you do more rigorous activities, you burn more calories and therefore tend to weigh less. It's also believed that people who have lifestyles in which they burn more calories also tend to have a higher metabolism perhaps because their bodies are better tuned for more physical activity even at rest.
So yeah, do what you can to get more physical activity into your day, but you have to make sure it's practical or you won't do it for long. If it's easy for you to spend an hour or two standing every day, by all means do it. If it means using a ball chair a few times a week to work your trunk muscles while you're working, that's also a good idea.
[guilt]...as I type this, I'm realizing that I haven't done my ball chair switcheroo in a while.[/guilt]
Forcing yourself to maintain "proper" posture is, IMO, often more harmful than slouching a bit, and I totally agree about switching it up.
It shouldn't be, but in practical application you're probably close to the truth because very few people understand what proper posture is. To most people, sitting up straight means to keep your back arched as much as possible, which is bad.
Proper posture is also deceiving because it is sometimes painful, but mostly so because people have suffered atrophied postural muscles from slouching and keeping poor posture. That does two things. The loss of strength needs no explanation, but also by becoming stooped, you begin to develop tightness that increases the amount of work your postural muscles need to do to hold you up right. For someone who's gotten into this cycle of weakness and tightness, proper posture causes so much discomfort that it'll seem bad, but they need to work through it or the alternative is worse.
Nice keyboard tray by the way!
Thank you! Do you have a pic of your setup? I'll post mine as soon as I clean my desk this week.
