What do beer fridges, state-of-the-art espresso machines and standing desks all have in common?
They belong at a start-up company and contrary to popular belief, none of them are very beneficial to your health.
Since the modern workforce sees most of us sitting still for almost eight hours at a time, obesity, heart problems and general health have all hung in the balance as we became a part of the rat race. So rather than reducing the insane number of hours we spend at the office, many companies thought ‘outside the box’ and introduced measures to get us on our feet.
A paper recently released in the Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews analyzed previous studies about the effects of workplace interventions to reduce sitting at work. These included standing desks, treadmill desks, as well as mindfulness training about excessive sitting at work and walking breaks.
The trial reviewed 20 earlier studies with a total of 2174 participants, all from high income nations (because the very definition of a First World problem is getting fat from sitting at your desk all day) to try to see how effective attempts to reduce sitting times have been at work. The various studies evaluated changes in workplace policy (e.g. information and training about too much sitting) and physical changes to the workplace in favour of walking/standing desks.
Researchers concluded that there is very little evidence to suggest that sit-stand desks (whereby the worker can adjust the height of their workstation) are able to reduce office sitting between 30 minutes and two hours without creating other adverse effects in the meantime.
However, Cochrane were unable to provide an answer to the overall health of those who stand at their desks for periods of time during the day since they found the studies to be flawed, random, or too short (i.e. less than six months) to give a real overview.
The reviewers at Cochrane reported that the office workers would have to stand at their desks for between two to four hours to alleviate issues created from excessive sitting. Breaks that took people away from their desks were all well and good, but they failed to actually decrease sitting times or provide solutions to the issues caused by the sitting in the first place.
But perhaps the worst advertisement for the expensive office equipment was Cochrane’s general evaluation that they aren’t even reducing times that people spend sitting down. The same was also true of other less pricey solutions, like software that encouraged others to stand up.
For example, those with computer prompts warning people to get up and move around may have reduced sitting times in some of the studies, but across all of them it never changed the actual number of sitting episodes that lasted for 30 minutes or longer.
Those who introduced walking breaks to their day did not see any decrease in sitting times. And those who engaged in a combination of multiple interventions saw no considerable difference between the initial changes in the office and a 12-month follow up session.
So what have we learned? Expensive technology and gentle nudges to get up and about at the office are fine. But we’re lazy, and as sedentary as our working lives have become, we’re never going to want to stand for extensive periods of time if we can avoid it.
We’re sorry, but there’s no escaping it – you need to get your ass to the gym before, during or after work if you want to burn any real calories.
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