11 ms·
The Men Who Stare At Screens (why going to the gym might not be good enough)
- lhorie 16y agoIt'd be interesting to see how much gym workout is equivalent in benefits to the frequent light-intensity activities recommended in the article. There are some pretty simple ways to add extra light physical activity to your daily routine. I tend to drink a lot of water, which means I need to go fill my bottle a few times a day and walk to the washroom more often than I would otherwise. There was also a TED talk about communities in Italy and Japan with long lifespans and lifestyles that involved lots of minor activities
- kscaldef 16y agoFor me it brought to mind the discussions a few weeks ago about standing desks. Would simply working standing be sufficient?
- diN0bot 16y agoHmmm, except it's "common" knowledge in the waitress industry that being busy enough to have to walk around and do things frequently is way better than slow days when there's lots of standing around. standing around wreaks havoc on joints and stuff. so....if you have a standing desk maybe the point is that you walk around more, whereas when one sits one is less inclined to get up for a minute walk.
- TheBurningOr 16y agoI'm finding with my standing desk that having good shoe support and a good soft carpet/pad to stand on is quite important.
- TheBurningOr 16y agoI'm finding with my standing desk that having good shoe support and a good soft carpet/pad to stand on is quite important for that very reason. It does help me to walk around more. I tend to move around quite a bit more than when I was just standing.
- TheBurningOr 16y agoI'm finding with my standing desk that having good shoe support and a good soft carpet/pad to stand on is quite important for that very reason. It does help me to walk around more. I tend to move around quite a bit more than when I was just sitting.
- jcl 16y ago(FYI, you can edit/delete comments if it has been less than two hours since you first posted them. Look for the edit and delete links on the right side of the comment's header line.)
- eru 16y agoHave you tried using your desk barefooted?
- pavel_lishin 16y agoMight be hard in an office environment.
- eru 16y agoDepends on your company. I am alternating going barefooted and using the Vibram Fivefingers where I work.
- vitobcn 16y agoOr wearing Vibram FiveFingers. That's what I do.
- mattm 16y agoProbably the same reason why men don't like shopping - too much standing around and not enough movement. I tried a self-made standing desk for a couple days but went back to sitting because I couldn't take the standing for long periods of time.
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- lhorie 16y agoIf you want to be extra sure, you could go for one of those treadmill desks http://www.google.com/images?hl=en&q=treadmill%20desk&um=1&ie=UTF-8&source=og&sa=N&tab=wi http://www.google.com/images?hl=en&q=treadmill%20desk...
- marcinw 16y agoI would imagine the constant bobbing up and down would be even worse for your eyes...
- SoftwareMaven 16y agoHunter-gatherers would be running around, tracking prey in the distance. Maybe the brain is wired to handle that well.
- vosper 16y agoI sit on a Swiss Ball, constantly bouncing up and down. It doesn't seem to have any impact on my typing or ability to read code.
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- Revisor 16y agoExactly what occured to me in this context. I've been thinking about an ergonomic sit/stand desk for a long time. A friend of mine, a teacher, has bought one and praised it immensely. Have a look at these products http://www.leuwico.com/web_e/products/office_furniture/ergodynamical_desks.html http://www.leuwico.com/web_e/products/office_furniture/ergod... The height can be adjusted either manually (hydraulic system) or with a motor. It works better than it sounds. You can adjust the height even with a loaded desk easily. The only question is: Would I remember to change my posture regularly?
- teehee 16y agoI bought trekdesk (http://www.trekdesk.com http://www.trekdesk.com) and I use it walking about 1.3 mph.
- jcl 16y agoAs a side note, I'm surprised that that site's FAQ appears to be advocating computer use on the treadmill but makes no mention of static discharge. In the winter, our treadmill becomes a giant Van de Graaff generator, unpleasant to use if you don't constantly ground yourself on a handrail. I gather this has not been a problem for you?
- teehee 16y agoI just started using it. Maybe I can try the wrist straps used by electronics workers to protect against static buildup. We'll see.
- rwmj 16y agoI got a static wrist strap which helps. (Every day, not just in winter!) Here's my desk: http://rwmj.wordpress.com/2010/01/25/treadmill-desk-part-6-hopefully-the-final-summary/ http://rwmj.wordpress.com/2010/01/25/treadmill-desk-part-6-h...
- AlekseyKorzun 16y agoShort work outs will produce the same result if they are performed within same time span day after day. You can mix the hours up for each work out but let's be honest... that would be too much of a hassle. I don't think article is very scientific; 'hitting the gym' can mean a lot of different things to a lot of different people. They can sit in the gym, do cardio, do weights, do stretches, etc. Too many variables. Obviously if subject goes to the gym and does 20 curls before calling it quits there will be absolutely no benefit. If you hit the gym during the lunch break or before/after work and throw cardio/stretching in (not just weights) you will be fine. Or simply do some good stretching here and there; problem solved.
- edkennedy 16y agoSitting for long periods of time has an effect you can easily see in a lot of Americans. A fat ass, from all the blood pooling in their mid section.
- thebigshane 16y agoLink to mentioned TED video: http://www.ted.com/talks/view/id/727 http://www.ted.com/talks/view/id/727 Summary: To find the path to long life and health, Dan Buettner and team study the world's "Blue Zones," communities whose elders live with vim and vigor to record-setting age. At TEDxTC, he shares the 9 common diet and lifestyle habits that keep them spry past age 100.
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- jsharpe 16y agoI wonder if this is because sitting and watching TV tends to correlate with poor diet (lots of snacking on unhealthy things while on the couch), whereas it's quite difficult to eat bad stuff while moving around all the time.
- elai 16y agoThat depends. Sometimes you get stuck with 7 eleven food as a result.
- starkfist 16y agoWhen I was a kid I used to skateboard around town about 8 hours a day, moving around all the time. I ate nothing but junk food during while doing this. What was I going to do, steam some brussell sprouts in the parking lot? It's more like existing in America tends to correlate with poor diet.
- c1sc0 16y agoI found just having access to high-quality ingredients at a reasonable price to be difficult in the US. More difficult than in Europe at least & waaay more difficult than in Asia (ok, one datapoint: China).
- gommm 16y agoHaving lived in the US, Europe and Japan and currently living China, I'd say that yes it's very difficult in the US, but in China it's rather difficult too... For example, I find it very hard to find good quality fish to cook (most of the fish you get here have a strange test I find)... It's easy to find organic produce here but it's not that cheap (at least compared to Europe), and I'm not exactly sure if I trust it as much as I trust organic produce in Europe or Japan... That said from my 6 month experience living in Rochester, US is much worse... (and don't talk to me about university "food" there)
- starkfist 16y agoI hear this all the time but when I lived in Japan and Germany I thought the food was expensive and the produce was of poor quality. Japan had cheap stuff like noodles, but vegetables and fruits were expensive. I've found the produce in the USA incredibly cheap and good most of the time.
- carbocation 16y agoThis is a warning sign: "Men who spent more than 23 hours a week watching TV and sitting in their cars (as passengers or as drivers) had a 64 percent greater chance of dying from heart disease than those who sat for 11 hours a week or less." 23 hours per week vs 11 hours per week? I call this a warning sign because it screams of post-hoc analysis. Unless they then used these as pre-specified cutoffs for later studies, I would be very cautious not to overinterpret.
- sdfx 16y agoFrom the abstract of the study: Participants were 7744 men (20-89 yr) initially free of CVD who returned a mail-back survey during 1982. Time spent watching TV and time spent riding in a car were reported. Mortality data were ascertained through the National Death Index until December 31, 2003. They noted that they adjusted for age. I presume other factors like the economic status correlate also with the time they watched tv. Don't know if they've adjusted for that as well.
- hugh3 16y agoSo they didn't take time spent sitting in an office into account at all? Seems odd. I spend at least two hours sitting at a desk for every hour I spend sitting on a couch or in a car seat.
- joe_the_user 16y agoIt's interesting indeed. Either they controlled for occupation (doubtful) or sitting in an office didn't matter or the thing whole is just off-base. One way that sitting in an office is different from watching TV involves complete passivity whereas in an office setting, your actively engaged in some task. But driving a car is probably closer to sitting in an office than watching TV. So the whole things seem problematic.
- carbocation 16y agoRight, but my point is not about whether or not they adjusted for the right factors. Whether or not they did that, it is clear that they took a retrospective peek at the data and said, "Aha! If we make cutpoints at 11 hours and 23 hours, we get interesting results." Adjustment for age, which should be done, has no bearing on whether this post hoc slicing of the data to give good results is proper. This is only OK so long as you're intentionally exploring, and then perhaps doing a follow-up study using those cutpoints in prespecified fashion using fresh data. In other words, if you went back and looked at your data and found the best cutoffs to maximize difference in risk, is it any surprise that you found a big difference in risk? This is why they need to validate these cutpoints in a separate study.
- ck2 16y agoRegular workout sessions do not appear to fully undo the effects of prolonged sitting Well there go my health insurance rates (if I could afford insurance).
- sliverstorm 16y agoHmm... I wonder if this has any implications when it comes to school?
- solson 16y agoAbsolutely it does... 1. The sit and watch - lecture model needs to die. 2. Students need to be given the option of sitting or standing in class and be allowed to alternate. 3. Punishments like sitting in detention, losing recess, or timeouts, should be replaced with activities like squats, sports, running laps, or simply walking. The wisdom of taking a hyperactive kid's recess away has always baffled me.
- Ardit20 16y agoYes because people have sat in desks in school only since the 1990s and we do not know whether they die earlier or not, so we must trust some study. They have been doing it for centuries and everybody is fine!.
- galdosd 16y ago"Everybody is fine", huh? I'm not sure you can make that claim so casually.
- c1sc0 16y agoWhat is it about improving health that brings out the most ridiculous concepts in fitness tool designs? This was advertised next to the article: http://i.imgur.com/PXsxO.png http://i.imgur.com/PXsxO.png What makes people want to spend money on tools like this when the greatest fitness tool is the human body itself?
- pavel_lishin 16y agoI'm fairly sure that 90% of those wacky "exercise" ideas - like the hip-swivel chair - were created on a whim, or as a bet between two businessmen. "Alright, we each have a month to come up with, manufacture, and advertise the most retarded exercise tool we can come up with. After six months of sales, we'll determine the winner by units shipped. Loser has to do a line of blow off the winner's genitals."
- LordLandon 16y agoWell, that explains the Shake Weight..
- tricky 16y agoThat's the #1 reason I want me and at least one good friend to be awash in FU money.
- mhd 16y agoPreferably the body of someone else. (And to be honest, the ads for pure resistance workouts are even douchier.)
- ams6110 16y agoJust another way to exploit the human weakness for easy answers. If you're fat, losing weight and getting in shape is going to take work. Either discipline to eat less, or to do real exercise (3 minutes a day using some gadget is going to do NOTHING), most likely both. TINSTAAFL.
- powrtoch 16y agoDo I get bonus METs if my legs never, ever, ever stop bouncing the entire time I'm at my desk?
- kevinskii 16y agoYes.
- pavel_lishin 16y agoI do remember reading that being twitchy can help you stay healthier, and lose weight. It all burns calories.
- chadmalik 16y agoI recall another study that figured out people who are the gym who flex in the mirror all the time (hate those guys!) get more fit. That probably applies to desk jockeys as well.
- pavel_lishin 16y agoAwesome. I'll pick up a mirror tonight, and start flexing into it while I work, shirtless. I'm sure the coworkers won't mind.
- trafficlight 16y agoShow them this study and tell them the solution is to flex in a mirror while you work. The goal is to get all of your coworkers doing this. Then you'll really have something.
- tobtoh 16y agoI believe so. For me, I'm always squashing stress balls (not because I'm stressed), twirling pens around my fingers, or playing with rubber bands (in addition to bouncing legs). I've always been on the thin side which people put down to high metabolism, but I suspect a lot of it is also to the fact I am in fact almost always in motion (even if only a small part of me).
- dialtone 16y agoWhy do these studies always avoid to talk about the intensity of the excercise for each subject. There's plenty of people at my gym that I've never seen sweating.
- thomasfl 16y agoSo when are some hacker news hacker going to make an iPhone app that uses to the gyro to track your movements through the day?
- dpritchett 16y agoiPhone pedometer apps: http://www.iphoneappsfinder.com/blog/15-best-pedometer-applications-for-iphone/ http://www.iphoneappsfinder.com/blog/15-best-pedometer-appli...
- solson 16y agoI work at Ergotron, and we are building solutions to this very problem, affordable sit/stand workstations. There are numerous studies that appear to indicate our bodies are not built to sit for prolonged periods of time. Sitting may in fact be killing us early. Check out http://juststand.org http://juststand.org
- mambodog 16y agoI've been thinking I'd like to get a standing workstation as it might encourage me to move around more, and I believe that even just to be standing most of the time is supposed to impact positively on heart health. Something like this would be awesome (though I imagine, pricey): http://www.amesystem.com.au/activdesk/ http://www.amesystem.com.au/activdesk/
- ekanes 16y agoI love mine and highly recommend doing it. You can do it VERY cheaply too. I went with 2 Stanley FatMax telescopic sawhorses and a door. Non-affiliate link: http://www.amazon.com/Stanley-11031-Telescopic-Plastic-Sawhorse/dp/B000MIVTJG/ http://www.amazon.com/Stanley-11031-Telescopic-Plastic-Sawho... Horribly outdated but accurate pic: http://icecreamforeveryone.files.wordpress.com/2009/03/img_0028.jpg?w=450&h=337 http://icecreamforeveryone.files.wordpress.com/2009/03/img_0... I feel more creative, have more energy throughout the day and my back feels stronger.
- ido 16y agoDon't you bump your head on that low ceiling all the time?
- Retric 16y agoI think the roof is at a significant angle, standing 2 feel back from the screen it's probably 1 to 2 feet above head height.
- ekanes 16y agoIt's an outdated pic, I quickly moved downstairs and took over our master bedroom. We sleep in the attic now.
- tomhogans 16y agoI'm surprised that sleeping is still a group activity for you after that.
- davidw 16y agoHuh, maybe I should just go into the tour guide business. I'd get lots of walking around here, probably eat better, and spend less time dicking around with bullshit code. I wonder what sort of unpleasant grief annoying tourists might cause... :-)
- chadgeidel 16y agoI have no idea, but I imagine it this way. Your users are incentivised to talk to you on a regular basis. You are never going to see a tourist again. If you hate users, you will LOATHE tourists.
- davidw 16y agoI like talking with people, actually. I could definitely see walking around talking for half a day - it'd be much healthier than sitting on my ass staring at crappy code.
- thomasfl 16y agoThis code is hardly rocket science. It's looks more like hard manual labour. But then again, so is also probably lot's of the code at bing and google to. my %holidays = ( 'mlk day' => undef, 'martin luther king day' => undef, 'martin luther kings birthday' => undef, 'presidents day' => undef, 'washingtons birthday' => undef, 'memorial day' => undef, 'independence day' => undef, 'labor day' => undef, 'columbus day' => undef, 'veteranss day' => undef, 'thanksgiving' => undef, 'fathers day' => undef, 'mothers day' => undef, 'inauguration day' => undef, 'ash wednesday' => undef, 'shrove tuesday' => undef, 'groundhog day' => undef, 'saint patricks day' => undef, 'easter' => undef, 'earth day' => undef, 'arbor day' => undef, 'cinco de mayo' => undef, 'st patricks day' => undef, 'flag day' => undef, 'rosh hashanah' => undef, 'yom kippur' => undef, 'halloween' => undef, 'election day' => undef, 'hanukkah' => undef, );
- rfugger 16y agoTry sitting on an exercise ball. That gets you plenty of muscle contractions just balancing on it.
- dgallagher 16y agoA Knee* Chair is another cool way to sit and always be "in movement". Due to their design, you're forced to reposition yourself every few minutes or so. *Technically you don't sit on your knees. You sit on your bottom (bearing most of the weight), and use your shins for balance.
- bdlang 16y agoThe study mentions nothing of eating habits; are we to believe each man (in 1982 no less) was eating a very healthy diet and all other factors were taken into consideration with regard to their lifestyle? For all we know they sat in front of the TV with a big bowl of ice cream, or ate a heavy meal in the evening before sitting down to relax. What about stressors, work or otherwise? Meh.
- chaostheory 16y agoThere is one really large potential problem with this study: it is just a big survey. Often there is a discrepancy between what people say and what people actually do. What if many of the individuals polled simply lied, told half truths, or were mistaken about their times? It's already been proven that men lie about their incomes, why doesn't this extend to an active lifestyle as well? For me to really take this seriously, these people need to be observed in some non-intrusive way. We do have the technology now, or so I think.
- enjo 16y agoWhile I'm not an expert on these type of studies, I am married to one. I often see these types of criticisms bantered about, but I'm fairly certain that these researchers are MUCH more sophisticated in their controls than we give them credit for. There is an entire body of research dedicated to ascertaining the quality and reliability of surveys, how surveys are delivered, and the conclusions that can be drawn from them. In doing these studies those methodologies are generally well understood (and clearly cited) as part of the paper itself. While I know those of us who where educated in the 'hard' sciences (I'm a physicist by training) find it hard to buy into these... I've been quite impressed by how rigorous they really are. I haven't read this particular study, so I may be way off base... but the fact that the fundamentals of the study involved a survey do not make it bad or invalid science (as long as the study was conducted properly that is).
- joe_the_user 16y agoThis isn't about how sophisticated researchers are. The limits to research into real world human behavior are pretty much inherent in the complexity and interrelatedness of said human behavior. Doing statistics is extremely hard because behaviors and conditions correlate with a many things at once, making the causal factor very hard to isolate. There have been a number of clever and rather specific ways in which research psychologists have gotten around these problems. But being an expert doesn't make you superman or give you unlimited bag of tricks dealing with this inherent difficulty. One obvious way that the study might be flawed could be that the respondents were more honest about how much TV they watched than about how much working-out they did, so TV-watched actually correlated better with exercise level than claimed level of exercise (and that's just one of hundreds possible problems). IE, until we know some specifics that researchers might have gotten around untruthness in research based on only survey data, we're entirely justified in being somewhat skeptical. "They're expert, they can do it" isn't enough.
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- fjabre 16y agoWonder if drinking green tea helps to bring you back to 'normal'.. Who knows what to make of this.. It's not easy hearing that the profession you've chosen puts you at greater risk for heart disease. If this is true I bet it could be balanced by good diet. I also have a dog which forces me to walk for at least 1-2 hours a day.
- awongh 16y agoI wonder if this applies to people who have nervous energy and move around when at their desks... I've read about studies that correlate your amount of nervous energy (tapping your toes, etc.) to your likelyhood of being obese. Maybe they're talking about movement on a different scale.
- quizbiz 16y agoSitting all day is probably bad for you. But everything productive I do is on the computer. How do I avoid sitting?
- etal 16y agoStand: http://www.osha.gov/SLTC/etools/computerworkstations/positions.html http://www.osha.gov/SLTC/etools/computerworkstations/positio... It takes a little while to get used to it, but once you're there, standing all day is just fine.
- palish 16y agoIt's satisfying to know that I've avoided wasting my time at the gym. Instead, I go through life accepting the fact that I'll be dead by 80. I find it both motivating and relaxing. Instead of literally wasting 20% of my time at the gym, I can instead waste it in much more interesting ways: on games, programming, TV shows. I believe this will result in an overall healthier mental lifestyle. And since my body maintains a constant weight of ~215 pounds, and since I have no use for physical stamina or strong muscles, I literally have no use for the gym.
- marknutter 16y agoThis smacks of the kind of news you see on The Today Show. I wouldn't be alarmed by this, we're a pretty adaptable species. Just stay active in your free time and you'll be fine. Sheesh.