Forget standing desks:
to stay healthy, you've got to move all day
If you want to dedicate yourself to a lifetime
of good habits, don’t start at the gym. Start at the office
Christopher Keyes for Outside
Wed 6 Feb 2019 11.00 GMT
A few years
ago, James Levine, a
doctor of endocrinology at the Mayo Clinic, sparked a radical change in America’s office
furniture. His research had inspired a pile of viral stories cataloging the
negative effects of sitting
at a desk: leg muscles shut down, blood pressure increases, good cholesterol
plummets, your children starve. OK, I made up that last one, but the real
takeaway was no less dire. “Excessive sitting is a lethal activity,” Levine,
who has studied
sedentary behavior for
nearly 20 years and is the most widely quoted expert on the topic, told the New
York Times in 2011. And the solution – at least the one people heard – was to
start standing.
A few years
ago →Past
simple (sparked)
For → Present perfect (has studied)
Cue the
office makeovers. Over the next several years, workers all across America
embraced stand-up desks. At Outside’s headquarters in Santa Fe, New Mexico, our
building manager furiously reconfigured work spaces. Desks were removed from
their shelving brackets, raised a foot and a half, and remounted. Walking the hallways, I’d do double takes every time I
realized that another editor had taken a stand against sitting. Close to half our
offices were eventually converted. Good science had spurred a
small change that was dramatically improving our health. We were literally
rising from the dead!
Cue: Give the to give a cue or cues to (an actor)
Double take: If you do a double-take when you
see or hear something strange or surprising, you hesitate for a moment before
reacting to it because you wonder if you really saw or heard it.
Spur: If something spurs a change or event, it makes
it happen faster or sooner.
Or were we? The stand-up revolution was
followed by another wave of stories reporting that being on your feet in the
same place all day has its own downsides, including
increased risk of cardiovascular problems. What’s more, at least at Outside,
few people’s habits really changed. This morning, I took a tour around our
building to assess our commitment to stand-up desks. In 14 of the converted
spaces, editors were either hunched over on stools or
perched on chairs that they had elevated to meet the new level. They were still
sitting, only higher. In a half-dozen other cases, people had simply lowered
their desks back to their old positions.
Stool: A stool is a seat with legs but no support for
your arms or back.
When I called Levine and told him what had
happened at Outside, he let out the sigh of a man who’d heard all this before.
“It’s not the furniture that makes the difference, it’s the behavior,” he said.
“The desk without the behavior doesn’t help you.”
In other words, we missed the larger point that
Levine and his colleagues were trying to convey. The solution to sitting isn’t
to stand, though it helps. In fact, according to the
findings of a 2015 consensus panel on the topic, we need to be on our feet two to four hours
while at work. But the real solution is to move. All day. The stillness is what’s killing us. We should be pacing the hallways and climbing stairs and squatting and lunging and stretching.
Stillness: If a place is still, it is quiet and shows no
sign of activity.
Pace: If you pace a small area, you keep walking up
and down it, because you are anxious or impatient.
Squat: An exercise in which a person crouches down and
rises up repeatedly
Lunge: If you lunge in a particular direction, you
move in that direction suddenly and clumsily.
Stretch: When you stretch, you put your arms or legs out
straight and tighten your muscles
Now that
requires a radical change, one exponentially more difficult than putting your
desk on stilts. But aiming for more movement might also
be the most important habit you adopt from an issue of Outside packed with 72
pages of fitness advice. This is especially true if, like me, you exercise
vigorously each day and therefore consider yourself healthy. Researchers have
shattered that idea. I might run for an hour every weekday morning, but studies
show that if I then go to work and sit at my desk for epic stretches, which I
do, I am no more immune to the side effects of sedentary living than the
prototypical couch potato.
Stilt: Stilts are long upright pieces of wood or metal
on which some buildings are built
When I accepted this scary conclusion, I realized how difficult moving
really is. I’m not like my ancestors who worked on a farm where motion was an
all-day requirement. My job seems specifically designed to keep me wasting away
in a chair. A phone and a computer allow me to communicate and conduct business
with nearly any writer on earth without leaving a two-foot radius.
When → Past simple
(accepted, realized)
Then there’s the fact that, as Levine put it,
“people don’t like change”. In one of his more recent studies, subjects who
agreed to take on a rigorous regimen to move throughout their workday saw an
initial spike in stress levels. Not surprisingly, the repeated prompts from
researchers to exercise were pissing them off.
Eventually, those subjects who managed to stick with
the plan experienced an overall decrease in stress – and, corporate-HR types
should note, a 15% increase in productivity. But therein
lies another challenge. How do you actually stick with a two-hour movement plan
without a team of researchers to keep you honest? Especially when you consider
what might be the biggest hurdle of all: the public
embarrassment. Moving all day requires one to willfully
perform lunges and complex yoga stretches and push-ups in a place where such
behavior seems loony. “Getting off your bottom is almost
forbidden,” said Levine. “We have to have environments that send the right
message.”
Piss someone off: If someone or something pisses you
off, they annoy you. It pisses me off when they start moaning about going to
war.
Therein: Therein means relating to something that has
just been mentioned.
Hurdle: A hurdle is a problem, difficulty, or part of a
process that may prevent you from achieving something. Hurdles is a race in
which people have to jump over a number of obstacles that are also called
hurdles. You can use hurdles to refer to one or more races.
Willfully: Obstinately
Loony: If you describe someone's behaviour or ideas as
loony, you mean that they seem mad, strange, or eccentric. Loony tunes.
Still, I was determined to be the guy who
changed his behavior. (Writing this article was a great motivator.) It didn’t
go so well at first. I arrived at work determined to move more, but once I sat
at my desk, old habits glued me to the computer and I forgot all about my
intentions. So I placed a sticky note on my office door that said FARTHER, a
little prompt reminding me to use the facility most distant from me every time
I needed a drink of water or bathroom break. I also connected my computer to
the printer downstairs and across the building. And rather than sending e-mails
or using the phone, I tried to go directly to colleagues’ offices.
Once I had those tricks nailed, I got some digital help. There are dozens of
fitness wearables that can remind you to move, from the basic step counter to
the fully loaded Apple Watch. Instead, I went with a free phone app called
Move. It buzzes every 45 minutes and assigns me a random exercise: say, 20
body-weight squats or 15 push-ups. These alerts initially drove me crazy.
(Again?!) And their commands can be cloyingly phrased: “It’s
time to move it, move it.” But eventually I welcomed the interruptions. I
noticed that I felt refreshed when I returned to my desk, like I’d rebooted my clogged circuitry.
Cloy: To surfeit, or make weary or displeased, by too
much of something, esp. something sweet, rich, etc.
Clog: to obstruct or become obstructed with thick or
sticky matter
And the embarrassment? I haven’t exactly been a
bold office revolutionary. Instead, I’ve meekly
learned to be a stealth mover. Now I either find ways to
look like I’m doing something perfectly normal or I make sure I don’t get
caught. I do push-ups with an ear cocked toward the door, listening for
approaching footsteps. I do wall sits in a corner that no one can see from the
hallway. While I’m on the phone, I pace as if I’m carefully deliberating vital magazine
business. At my desk, I do inconspicuous yoga poses
with names like seated eagle and hip opener. I do laps around the building
carrying papers to look as if I’m going somewhere, when all I’m really doing is
walking in a large, 223-step circle back to my office. (If you want the full
log from a recent day, see “Self Pro Motion”, below.)
Bold: Someone who is bold is not afraid to do things
which involve risk or danger.
Meekly: If you describe a person as meek, you think
that they are gentle and quiet, and likely to do what other people say.
Stealth: If you use stealth when you do something, you
do it quietly and carefully so that no one will notice what you are doing.
Inconspicuous: Someone who is inconspicuous does
not attract attention to themselves. (discret / discrete)
Am I happier? Less stressed? More productive?
Any conclusions I draw from my experiment would be based on anecdotal evidence,
the enemy of real research. But here’s what’s certain: if I continue to squeeze
in an extra hour or two of movement each day, I’ll be significantly healthier
in the long run. That’s the takeaway Levine and his colleagues need us to hear.
If you want
to dedicate yourself to a lifetime of good habits, don’t start at the gym.
Start at the office.
What three hours of
daily movements looks like
7am
Morning run (45 minutes)
8.30am
Walk to coffee shop (10 minutes)
9.15am
25 push-ups (1 minute)
10am
Wall sit (2 minutes)
Walk around the building plus three flights of
stairs (5 minutes)
10.45am
20 body-weight squats (2 minutes)
Trip to far water fountain (3 minutes)
11.30am
Pick up papers at printer plus two flights of
stairs (4 minutes)
12.15pm
25 push-ups (1 minute)
15 side lunges, each leg (2 minutes)
Plank pose (2 minutes)
Pacing during phone call (10 minutes)
1pm
Walk around building for quick meetings (10
minutes)
Desk yoga: hip openers, seated eagles, spinal
rotations, shoulder stretches (5 minutes)
2pm
25 push-ups (1 minute)
2.30pm
Walking meeting (45 minutes)
3.30pm
15 Hindu push-ups (1 minute)
20 side leg raises (1 minute)
4.15pm
Chair pose (1 minute)
20 body-weight squats (2 minutes)
Walk around the building (5 minutes)
5pm
Plank pose (2 minutes)
20 burpees (2 minutes)
5.45pm
Walk around building plus four flights of
stairs (5 minutes)
Not tracked: Walking to and from the car,
roaming the grocery store, playing with my kids, etc.
This story was originally published by Outside,
the leading publication for those who love the outdoors
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