11 ms·

'The chair is out to kill us'. Studies point to the health risks of sitting

42 points by ronnier 13y ago

tokenadult 13y ago
One reason I live where I do is so that I am within a mile (which, for me, is walking distance) of much of my shopping and from the county library branch. Being able to walk to do errands reduces driving, which reduces sitting, and increases exercise. At my computer keyboard, where I live continually, I sit on an exercise ball rather than any kind of chair. Even at that, I should probably get up and move around more, but at least I have the routine of a homeschooling parent of three children still living at home to provide interruptions and occasions to change my posture. It's hard to optimize for everything, but so far I've avoided the worst of the health symptoms mentioned in the article kindly submitted here, even though I am already of middle age.
- aaron695 13y ago
  My understanding is walking rather than than driving for instance is NOT a solution to this specific issue (It's great for other reasons). It is in part, as in you might sit for 13 hours a day so 30 mins less sitting makes you 3% better off but really it's not the solution. Similarly to getting up and walking around, if you do it 5 mins ever hour that's 4% better off. My understanding is these studies are saying to make change you need to stop sitting for large periods of time (ie reduce by 50+%), if you don't want to die/become crippled early.
- jonathanjaeger 13y ago
  I second this. I try to sit on an exercise ball as much as possible at work (sitting, bouncing, stretching on it). I can't usually make it for a full 8-10 hour day, so I usually switch to a regular chair with back rest in the afternoon. Other than walking around, the variety helps me.
mtgx 13y ago
> "Every hour of TV that people watch, presumably while sitting, cuts about 22 minutes from their life span, the study's authors calculated." Can that be real? That's a very serious issue if true.
- icebraining 13y ago
  The study: http://bjsm.bmj.com/content/46/13/927.full http://bjsm.bmj.com/content/46/13/927.full
- saurik 13y ago
  This LA Times article, like every article that you ever see discussing any of these results, describes a causation: "sitting cuts about 22 minutes from their life span". None of these "studies" were "experiments" that are capable of demonstrating causation: they are either cohort studies or surveys, and are only able to demonstrate correlation. In this case, "The authors constructed a life table model that incorporates a previously reported mortality risk associated with TV time. Data were from the Australian Bureau of Statistics and the Australian Diabetes, Obesity and Lifestyle Study, a national population-based observational survey that started in 1999–2000. The authors modelled impacts of changes in population average TV viewing time on life expectancy at birth." We thereby have to ask, what is the more likely explanation: that sitting causes your life span to decrease, or that the same things that cause your life span to decrease make sitting, or watching television, something you do more often? We aren't doing experiments where we assign people into groups, one which will sit for most of their life and one which will stand/walk, so we can't assume the causation. Maybe you don't have any friends, and maybe that is why you sit inside all day watching the television. Some people believe being a social outcast directly leads to health issues, but one could also point out that friends often are the people who goad you into seeing the doctor for that thing you never cared enough about, or are quite literally the people who pick you up when you fall, maybe calling 911. Alternatively, it could be that your life really sucks, and you need the outlet of watching television to make your life feel more reasonable. Things that cause peoples' lives to suck might be abusive relationships, chronic illness, or stressful jobs (and other studies, I believe even real experiments, and I even further believe demonstrated mechanisms, show that stress leads to health problems). Some might argue "it is easy to control for people who are dying and remove them from your study", but it is very difficult to control for subtle effects, and we are talking about a subtle effect here. This is especially true once you look into compliance effects: people who don't sit around all day watching television are probably also the kinds of people who visit the dentist regularly, or simply eat better food. The result of this mistake is that it could even be dangerous to be making claims that sitting reduces your lifespan: maybe by telling the people who are sitting around watching television that its unhealthy for them (again, based on no direct evidence) causes them to now feel bad about watching television, increasing their stress, or even causes them to push themselves even further to exercise, when they were sitting down because their knee was already giving out. A lot of people, at this point, get angry at shoddy science reporting. That's a real problem: articles like this blow studies that are correlations into causations. The result is that people hear every couple years opposing information on some debates they care about (such as whether something like wine or aspirin is "good for your heart"), and eventually decide "it isn't like scientists know anything" and "give it a year, we'll learn something new", something they then apply to other branches of science (like evolution). But, frankly: the scientists who are publishing these papers really need to use less ambiguous wording--especially if they are not going to be really proactive reaching out to press to be involved in the writing of the articles, making certain the right kinds of hedges get quoted by the reporters (which may scuttle the article, as maybe it is no longer interesting to them: in comparison to bad information spreading, less reporting should be a positive thing)--as I think they are complicit in the confusion. This paper uses wording that technically doesn't imply a correlation if you know what all of the words mean and you are careful with your reading, but to any normal person they are quite clearly saying "X causes Y": "The amount of TV viewed in Australia in 2008 reduced life expectancy at birth by 1.8 years (95% uncertainty interval (UI): 8.4 days to 3.7 years) for men and 1.5 years (95% UI: 6.8 days to 3.1 years) for women...". When I read that, I know that that just means "if I'm building a probability distribution over the life expectancy of a person (who would be similar to the people studied, potentially including 'having not heard about this study') and I know how much TV they watch I can use that information to adjust my expectation based on this metric, as established by this well-founded study". However, "X reduced life expectancy" to normal people means "if I do X it will reduce my life expectancy, and if I avoid X, I can avoid that effect". :(
kvee 13y ago
Does anyone know if sitting at an angle is actually significantly better for you? The coworking space I work out of in RI just got one of these: http://www.focaluprightfurniture.com/ergonomic-benefits/ http://www.focaluprightfurniture.com/ergonomic-benefits/
- skolos 13y ago
  Or lying on a couch. All studies compare sitting with walking. How about sitting vs standing? Or sitting vs lying? When I work, I prefer to lie on a couch rather than sit at a desk. And I am not kidding - I am more productive that way.
Dewie 13y ago
At this point I feel that I might as well have a working theory of "if it is pleasurable or comfortable, it kills me" and go from there...
- youngerdryas 13y ago
  I want to party with you, madman.
csallen 13y ago
Is there a study that doesn't assume correlation == causation? Yes, lots of people who are generally unhealthy also have jobs that require sitting for hours at a time. But what does that mean for someone who lives an otherwise healthy lifestyle? Let's say person A burns 1000 calories a day at his job, and only sits for a few hours when he goes home. Person B burns 1000 calories in his off time, but sits at work for 8 hours. Is person B still more likely to suffer health defects and die early? If so, why?
- salmonellaeater 13y ago
  Person B is more likely to die early. Sitting is correlated with bad health, independent of your diet and amount of exercise. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22218159 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22218159 Now, I'd love to see a randomized trial over a long time period to find out whether sitting actually causes bad health, or is just correlated.
  - TheBiv 13y ago
    I doubt we learned anything from the study above, bc your end conclusion is the exact question that the person before you led with.
- nwhitehead 13y ago
  All the studies so far indicate sitting (or other forms of inactivity) are bad no matter how much you exercise at other times. The best natural experiment was the London bus driver study which showed huge differences in heart problems between drivers (sitting all day) and conductors (standing all day). Both were drawn from the same pool of employees and randomly assigned roles, so the experiment was naturally controlled for everything except the difference in behavior. There were some other differences such as drivers having a more stressful job and conductors having more social interactions which might explain some of the differences in outcomes apart from the sitting/moving difference. But in any case, sitting for hours a day at a stressful job with minimal social interaction is incredibly bad for your health. Programmers take note!
  - 13y ago
chipsy 13y ago
Lately I've been using my phone to do a cycle of 15/5 minutes sitting/standing, with standing time also being a break from the computer. It's worked really well. The break time is not really an interruption; 5 minutes is enough for most small chores, and if I don't have any of those, I can use it for mindfulness practice. Plus chopping it up gives me better estimates about time usage and how much I can get out of any given work day - after a certain point it becomes clear that I'm spending most of each cycle on distractions, so I'll start adjusting my plan to match reality. I could probably use Pomodoro or any similar cycle and also get good results, I just happened to try this first.
appscript 13y ago
Is there a good resource online that gives the best practices when sitting on a chair to minimize damage per second to ourselves ?
JoeKM 13y ago
Standing all the time isn't healthy either, but one thing standing desks promote better is taking breaks more often. I'm more willing to walk around and stretch if I'm already standing, than if I'm sitting. I've been using a GeekDesk for 2 years now. I recently purchased a LifeSpan Treadmill (just the base) for my standing desk as the next step, and really like it. Careful though, you can't go from sitting to treadmill, it's too much body shock, you'll need to ease into standing for a few months first.
- joonix 13y ago
  Price is steep on these, presumably due to the motors. Is there a similar desk that you can elevate with a simple hydraulic foot pedal? Kind of like the chairs at a hair salon.
  - kd5bjo 13y ago
    For a while, my home desk has been a $100 bar table bought from Ikea; if I want to sit, I have a stool handy.
walshemj 13y ago
This sounds very like Stanley Green (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanley_Green)a http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanley_Green)a very well known english eccentric who used to walk up and down oxford street with a sandwich board that read “Less Lust, By Less Protein: Meat Fish Bird; Egg Cheese; Peas Beans; Nuts. And Sitting," I believe one of his thesis was that to much sitting led to horrors like the Rolling stones and the whole permissive 60’s He was a well known sight to any one who worked in central London pre 1993 when he died.
trafficlight 13y ago
I just opened a coworking space a couple of months ago. It used to be an auto shop, so we tried to maintain that feel. My favorite part is the old hydraulic lift that we converted into a standing height desk. https://sphotos-a.xx.fbcdn.net/hphotos-ash3/579181_2967646845592_239634524_n.jpg https://sphotos-a.xx.fbcdn.net/hphotos-ash3/579181_296764684...
- pgrote 13y ago
  What surface are you using? Can the lift still move up and down?
  - dj2stein9 13y ago
    I would've been tempted to modify the lift such that the entire desk could retract into the floor, leaving an open area when it's needed.
  - trafficlight 13y ago
    Ikea table tops on a 2x4 wood frame. The lift does work just fine, however it never sat flush with the floor to begin with.
- luma 13y ago
  I recently built a setup at home[1] using a commercially available powered lift frame[2]. Only been using it for a month or so now, but the ability to stand during the day and sit for things like gaming is great. [1] http://imgur.com/a/ORfG0 http://imgur.com/a/ORfG0 [2] http://www.geekdesk.com/default.asp?contentID=630 http://www.geekdesk.com/default.asp?contentID=630
  - ux-app 13y ago
    That is a really nice setup! What's in the cabinets on the left hand side of the first image?
    - luma 13y ago
piggybox 13y ago
I'm glad I replaced my comfortable Herman Miller chair with a very cheap ball chair which encourages active sitting
quaffapint 13y ago
Too much of anything is bad for you. Too much sitting? Get up and move around. Too much standing - take a load off. Too much sugar, too much caffeine. How's this any different than the standard saying of "all in moderation".
tednaleid 13y ago
Anyone have experience with the Humanscale Float standing desk? http://www.humanscale.com/products/product_detail.cfm?group=float http://www.humanscale.com/products/product_detail.cfm?group=... I've been thinking about getting a sit/stand desk for a while, but don't like the electric ones as they seem really slow. This seems the nicest of the manually operated ones (better looking than the steelcase one IMO).
mdip 13y ago
I don't entirely know what to do with this story. "Sitting" (or more specifically, the way I "sit" all day) resulted in me having pretty awful back pain that required treatment earlier this year. I had bad posture spent 4-5 hours stationary writing code. Having a standing desk would have probably helped me to take more breaks and move around. A little app called Kitchen Timer, combined with a very mild set of stretching/exercises works for me now. I don't have heart problems. My "inputs" match my "outputs". I've maintained my weight within 5 pounds for 10 years. The thing that bothers me about this article is the way it's presented. It's designed to scare ... and I know first hand that it works. Growing up, my mom wouldn't let me stand anywhere near the microwave because of something she saw on 20/20. We heated up food the same way we lit fireworks ("strike" and "run!") When I purchased my first cell phone she panicked about the RADIATION and warned me against using it regularly (Chernobyl === Magnetron to her). My mom watched 20/20 all the time! I have no interest in a standing desk. I work well sitting down, and the timer gives me a nice reminder to stretch out which I can choose to ignore if I'm focused on something I can't pull away from. I smoked as a teenager ... maybe I'm being naive and using anec-data, but my chair is no Marlboro.
logn 13y ago
Well, this article is rubbish and is pretty typical of crappy scientific reporting. However, I like thinking about ergonomics. Do many people here recline while working? I've been working for a year now, laying back on a couch, feet up and head on a pillow. It works well, but even before this I had carpal tunnel which this doesn't help (it did for a while though). I've resorted to padded gloves that ease my pain: http://www.activeforever.com/smart-glove-wrist-support?productid=292 http://www.activeforever.com/smart-glove-wrist-support?produ...
- DanBC 13y ago
  I've been reclining a lot and now my right arm is painful. I'm not typing with it at all for the next two weeks. I need to work out some system of props to rest my elbows on.
LowKarmaAccount 13y ago
Standing desks can hurt you if you don't wear proper shoes and/or use some kind of standing mat; regular desks can hurt you if your chair is unergonomic (there was an article on HN about this two weeks ago.) In a similar vein, you can develop RSI if you use an poorly designed keyboard, but that doesn't mean typing will eventually give you RSI. Hn discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5719891 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5719891

42 points by ronnier 13y ago

One reason I live where I do is so that I am within a mile (which, for me, is walking distance) of much of my shopping and from the county library branch. Being able to walk to do errands reduces driving, which reduces sitting, and increases exercise. At my computer keyboard, where I live continually, I sit on an exercise ball rather than any kind of chair. Even at that, I should probably get up and move around more, but at least I have the routine of a homeschooling parent of three children still living at home to provide interruptions and occasions to change my posture. It's hard to optimize for everything, but so far I've avoided the worst of the health symptoms mentioned in the article kindly submitted here, even though I am already of middle age.

aaron695 13y ago
My understanding is walking rather than than driving for instance is NOT a solution to this specific issue (It's great for other reasons). It is in part, as in you might sit for 13 hours a day so 30 mins less sitting makes you 3% better off but really it's not the solution. Similarly to getting up and walking around, if you do it 5 mins ever hour that's 4% better off. My understanding is these studies are saying to make change you need to stop sitting for large periods of time (ie reduce by 50+%), if you don't want to die/become crippled early.
jonathanjaeger 13y ago
I second this. I try to sit on an exercise ball as much as possible at work (sitting, bouncing, stretching on it). I can't usually make it for a full 8-10 hour day, so I usually switch to a regular chair with back rest in the afternoon. Other than walking around, the variety helps me.

mtgx 13y ago

> "Every hour of TV that people watch, presumably while sitting, cuts about 22 minutes from their life span, the study's authors calculated." Can that be real? That's a very serious issue if true.

icebraining 13y ago
The study: http://bjsm.bmj.com/content/46/13/927.full http://bjsm.bmj.com/content/46/13/927.full
saurik 13y ago
This LA Times article, like every article that you ever see discussing any of these results, describes a causation: "sitting cuts about 22 minutes from their life span". None of these "studies" were "experiments" that are capable of demonstrating causation: they are either cohort studies or surveys, and are only able to demonstrate correlation. In this case, "The authors constructed a life table model that incorporates a previously reported mortality risk associated with TV time. Data were from the Australian Bureau of Statistics and the Australian Diabetes, Obesity and Lifestyle Study, a national population-based observational survey that started in 1999–2000. The authors modelled impacts of changes in population average TV viewing time on life expectancy at birth." We thereby have to ask, what is the more likely explanation: that sitting causes your life span to decrease, or that the same things that cause your life span to decrease make sitting, or watching television, something you do more often? We aren't doing experiments where we assign people into groups, one which will sit for most of their life and one which will stand/walk, so we can't assume the causation. Maybe you don't have any friends, and maybe that is why you sit inside all day watching the television. Some people believe being a social outcast directly leads to health issues, but one could also point out that friends often are the people who goad you into seeing the doctor for that thing you never cared enough about, or are quite literally the people who pick you up when you fall, maybe calling 911. Alternatively, it could be that your life really sucks, and you need the outlet of watching television to make your life feel more reasonable. Things that cause peoples' lives to suck might be abusive relationships, chronic illness, or stressful jobs (and other studies, I believe even real experiments, and I even further believe demonstrated mechanisms, show that stress leads to health problems). Some might argue "it is easy to control for people who are dying and remove them from your study", but it is very difficult to control for subtle effects, and we are talking about a subtle effect here. This is especially true once you look into compliance effects: people who don't sit around all day watching television are probably also the kinds of people who visit the dentist regularly, or simply eat better food. The result of this mistake is that it could even be dangerous to be making claims that sitting reduces your lifespan: maybe by telling the people who are sitting around watching television that its unhealthy for them (again, based on no direct evidence) causes them to now feel bad about watching television, increasing their stress, or even causes them to push themselves even further to exercise, when they were sitting down because their knee was already giving out. A lot of people, at this point, get angry at shoddy science reporting. That's a real problem: articles like this blow studies that are correlations into causations. The result is that people hear every couple years opposing information on some debates they care about (such as whether something like wine or aspirin is "good for your heart"), and eventually decide "it isn't like scientists know anything" and "give it a year, we'll learn something new", something they then apply to other branches of science (like evolution). But, frankly: the scientists who are publishing these papers really need to use less ambiguous wording--especially if they are not going to be really proactive reaching out to press to be involved in the writing of the articles, making certain the right kinds of hedges get quoted by the reporters (which may scuttle the article, as maybe it is no longer interesting to them: in comparison to bad information spreading, less reporting should be a positive thing)--as I think they are complicit in the confusion. This paper uses wording that technically doesn't imply a correlation if you know what all of the words mean and you are careful with your reading, but to any normal person they are quite clearly saying "X causes Y": "The amount of TV viewed in Australia in 2008 reduced life expectancy at birth by 1.8 years (95% uncertainty interval (UI): 8.4 days to 3.7 years) for men and 1.5 years (95% UI: 6.8 days to 3.1 years) for women...". When I read that, I know that that just means "if I'm building a probability distribution over the life expectancy of a person (who would be similar to the people studied, potentially including 'having not heard about this study') and I know how much TV they watch I can use that information to adjust my expectation based on this metric, as established by this well-founded study". However, "X reduced life expectancy" to normal people means "if I do X it will reduce my life expectancy, and if I avoid X, I can avoid that effect". :(

kvee 13y ago

Does anyone know if sitting at an angle is actually significantly better for you? The coworking space I work out of in RI just got one of these: http://www.focaluprightfurniture.com/ergonomic-benefits/ http://www.focaluprightfurniture.com/ergonomic-benefits/

skolos 13y ago
Or lying on a couch. All studies compare sitting with walking. How about sitting vs standing? Or sitting vs lying? When I work, I prefer to lie on a couch rather than sit at a desk. And I am not kidding - I am more productive that way.

Dewie 13y ago

At this point I feel that I might as well have a working theory of "if it is pleasurable or comfortable, it kills me" and go from there...

youngerdryas 13y ago
I want to party with you, madman.

csallen 13y ago

Is there a study that doesn't assume correlation == causation? Yes, lots of people who are generally unhealthy also have jobs that require sitting for hours at a time. But what does that mean for someone who lives an otherwise healthy lifestyle? Let's say person A burns 1000 calories a day at his job, and only sits for a few hours when he goes home. Person B burns 1000 calories in his off time, but sits at work for 8 hours. Is person B still more likely to suffer health defects and die early? If so, why?

salmonellaeater 13y ago
Person B is more likely to die early. Sitting is correlated with bad health, independent of your diet and amount of exercise. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22218159 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22218159 Now, I'd love to see a randomized trial over a long time period to find out whether sitting actually causes bad health, or is just correlated.
- TheBiv 13y ago
  I doubt we learned anything from the study above, bc your end conclusion is the exact question that the person before you led with.
nwhitehead 13y ago
All the studies so far indicate sitting (or other forms of inactivity) are bad no matter how much you exercise at other times. The best natural experiment was the London bus driver study which showed huge differences in heart problems between drivers (sitting all day) and conductors (standing all day). Both were drawn from the same pool of employees and randomly assigned roles, so the experiment was naturally controlled for everything except the difference in behavior. There were some other differences such as drivers having a more stressful job and conductors having more social interactions which might explain some of the differences in outcomes apart from the sitting/moving difference. But in any case, sitting for hours a day at a stressful job with minimal social interaction is incredibly bad for your health. Programmers take note!
- 13y ago

chipsy 13y ago

Lately I've been using my phone to do a cycle of 15/5 minutes sitting/standing, with standing time also being a break from the computer. It's worked really well. The break time is not really an interruption; 5 minutes is enough for most small chores, and if I don't have any of those, I can use it for mindfulness practice. Plus chopping it up gives me better estimates about time usage and how much I can get out of any given work day - after a certain point it becomes clear that I'm spending most of each cycle on distractions, so I'll start adjusting my plan to match reality. I could probably use Pomodoro or any similar cycle and also get good results, I just happened to try this first.

appscript 13y ago

Is there a good resource online that gives the best practices when sitting on a chair to minimize damage per second to ourselves ?

JoeKM 13y ago

Standing all the time isn't healthy either, but one thing standing desks promote better is taking breaks more often. I'm more willing to walk around and stretch if I'm already standing, than if I'm sitting. I've been using a GeekDesk for 2 years now. I recently purchased a LifeSpan Treadmill (just the base) for my standing desk as the next step, and really like it. Careful though, you can't go from sitting to treadmill, it's too much body shock, you'll need to ease into standing for a few months first.

joonix 13y ago
Price is steep on these, presumably due to the motors. Is there a similar desk that you can elevate with a simple hydraulic foot pedal? Kind of like the chairs at a hair salon.
- kd5bjo 13y ago
  For a while, my home desk has been a $100 bar table bought from Ikea; if I want to sit, I have a stool handy.

walshemj 13y ago

This sounds very like Stanley Green (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanley_Green)a http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanley_Green)a very well known english eccentric who used to walk up and down oxford street with a sandwich board that read “Less Lust, By Less Protein: Meat Fish Bird; Egg Cheese; Peas Beans; Nuts. And Sitting," I believe one of his thesis was that to much sitting led to horrors like the Rolling stones and the whole permissive 60’s He was a well known sight to any one who worked in central London pre 1993 when he died.

trafficlight 13y ago

I just opened a coworking space a couple of months ago. It used to be an auto shop, so we tried to maintain that feel. My favorite part is the old hydraulic lift that we converted into a standing height desk. https://sphotos-a.xx.fbcdn.net/hphotos-ash3/579181_2967646845592_239634524_n.jpg https://sphotos-a.xx.fbcdn.net/hphotos-ash3/579181_296764684...

pgrote 13y ago
What surface are you using? Can the lift still move up and down?
- dj2stein9 13y ago
  I would've been tempted to modify the lift such that the entire desk could retract into the floor, leaving an open area when it's needed.
- trafficlight 13y ago
  Ikea table tops on a 2x4 wood frame. The lift does work just fine, however it never sat flush with the floor to begin with.
luma 13y ago
I recently built a setup at home[1] using a commercially available powered lift frame[2]. Only been using it for a month or so now, but the ability to stand during the day and sit for things like gaming is great. [1] http://imgur.com/a/ORfG0 http://imgur.com/a/ORfG0 [2] http://www.geekdesk.com/default.asp?contentID=630 http://www.geekdesk.com/default.asp?contentID=630
- ux-app 13y ago
  That is a really nice setup! What's in the cabinets on the left hand side of the first image?
  - luma 13y ago

piggybox 13y ago

I'm glad I replaced my comfortable Herman Miller chair with a very cheap ball chair which encourages active sitting

quaffapint 13y ago

Too much of anything is bad for you. Too much sitting? Get up and move around. Too much standing - take a load off. Too much sugar, too much caffeine. How's this any different than the standard saying of "all in moderation".

tednaleid 13y ago

Anyone have experience with the Humanscale Float standing desk? http://www.humanscale.com/products/product_detail.cfm?group=float http://www.humanscale.com/products/product_detail.cfm?group=... I've been thinking about getting a sit/stand desk for a while, but don't like the electric ones as they seem really slow. This seems the nicest of the manually operated ones (better looking than the steelcase one IMO).

mdip 13y ago

I don't entirely know what to do with this story. "Sitting" (or more specifically, the way I "sit" all day) resulted in me having pretty awful back pain that required treatment earlier this year. I had bad posture spent 4-5 hours stationary writing code. Having a standing desk would have probably helped me to take more breaks and move around. A little app called Kitchen Timer, combined with a very mild set of stretching/exercises works for me now. I don't have heart problems. My "inputs" match my "outputs". I've maintained my weight within 5 pounds for 10 years. The thing that bothers me about this article is the way it's presented. It's designed to scare ... and I know first hand that it works. Growing up, my mom wouldn't let me stand anywhere near the microwave because of something she saw on 20/20. We heated up food the same way we lit fireworks ("strike" and "run!") When I purchased my first cell phone she panicked about the RADIATION and warned me against using it regularly (Chernobyl === Magnetron to her). My mom watched 20/20 all the time! I have no interest in a standing desk. I work well sitting down, and the timer gives me a nice reminder to stretch out which I can choose to ignore if I'm focused on something I can't pull away from. I smoked as a teenager ... maybe I'm being naive and using anec-data, but my chair is no Marlboro.

logn 13y ago

Well, this article is rubbish and is pretty typical of crappy scientific reporting. However, I like thinking about ergonomics. Do many people here recline while working? I've been working for a year now, laying back on a couch, feet up and head on a pillow. It works well, but even before this I had carpal tunnel which this doesn't help (it did for a while though). I've resorted to padded gloves that ease my pain: http://www.activeforever.com/smart-glove-wrist-support?productid=292 http://www.activeforever.com/smart-glove-wrist-support?produ...

DanBC 13y ago
I've been reclining a lot and now my right arm is painful. I'm not typing with it at all for the next two weeks. I need to work out some system of props to rest my elbows on.

LowKarmaAccount 13y ago

Standing desks can hurt you if you don't wear proper shoes and/or use some kind of standing mat; regular desks can hurt you if your chair is unergonomic (there was an article on HN about this two weeks ago.) In a similar vein, you can develop RSI if you use an poorly designed keyboard, but that doesn't mean typing will eventually give you RSI. Hn discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5719891 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5719891