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Creativity in motion

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It’s ten minutes from lunch and you’ve just finished a long meeting. Toward the end of the meeting, a new project proposal was raised by your manager. This project is different to your average work project and requires consideration of factors not typically present within your usual work. You ran out of time in the meeting to brainstorm as a team, so your manager encouraged you to think about possible ways to creatively and effectively approach the project between now and the next meeting. Your options for the next ten minutes are: Quickly return to your desk and use the time to tick off some easy tasks before lunch. Stay in the board room and write down some strategies for the project proposal while it’s fresh. Take a ten-minute walk and verbally brainstorm your ideas. If you picked option “3”, you might just come up with the most amount of appropriately novel (or creative) ideas. How? A study by researchers from Stanford University tested university students’ ability to produce creative ideas from either a seated or a walking condition. It was found that those who switched from sitting to walking in their second trial, produced more novel and quality ideas…

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Simple activities to be active at your desk – Part 3

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Desk-based workers can spend a lot of time at their desk sitting. If you are a regular follow of this blog, you will know that high levels of sitting time can have several detrimental impacts on health and wellbeing, including on cognitive function, risk of diabetes, physical function and quality of life. Prolonged sitting – that is, sitting for a long time without taking a break – is emerging as particularly harmful, which is why we promote regular breaks from sitting at BeUpstanding. Indeed, a 2022 systematic review and meta-analysis by Loh and colleagues highlighted the beneficial effects of having regular physical activity breaks on blood sugar, insulin, and triacylglycerol measures. Their article concluded that taking short breaks from prolonged sitting results in better glycemic control and improved metabolic control compared to individuals who do not incorporate short physical activity breaks. One impact of too much sitting for too long is on our musculoskeletal health. Here, prolonged sitting can cause tight hip flexors and leg muscles. Vanroelen (2022) states that these imbalances are due to the shortened and lengthened muscles in your legs due to muscle weakness and tightness. These imbalances can lead to a compensatory hyperlordosis or excessive inward…

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Simple activities to be active at your desk – Part 2

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Guidelines recommend regular breaks from prolonged sitting, and at team BeUpstanding, we encourage breaks at least every 30 minutes. Here are some activities that you can do at your desk to help combat some of the impacts of prolonged sitting. Individuals who sit for a prolonged amount of time tend to have rounded shoulders, tight neck muscles, and have back pain and this is known as upper-crossed syndrome. Balciuniene et al. discuss that there is an imbalance with your upper body muscles like your upper trapezius, levator scapula, and pectoralis major and minor, since these dorsal and ventral muscles cross, which create a pattern of joint dysfunction leading to spinal stress and poor posture. These features of having a forward head posture and thoracic kyphosis, excessive upper back curvature, to name a few, leads to poor shoulder stability and mobility, especially at the glenohumoral joint in your shoulder. This causes an overactivation of some muscles like your levator scapulae and upper trapezius to try to maintain body alignment. Kim et al. (2016) determined that postural pain syndrome can be a result from upper-crossed syndrome and poor posture due to prolonged sitting. Lee et al. (2017) discussed that incorporating exercises using…

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Investment and usage of sit-stand workstations

Latest evidence

One strategy that has been shown to result in substantial reductions in workplace sedentary time, particularly when accompanied by behaviour change programs like BeUpstanding, has been the use of sit-stand workstations. These workstations allow a user to shift between a sitting and standing posture while working on their computer. The popularity of sit-stand workstations in Australia has exploded, with a report showing a 400% increase in sales of sit-stand workstations since the start of the coronavirus pandemic, with over 90% delivered to home addresses. This phenomenon isn’t just restricted to Australia with a global market research report showing that sales of sit-stand workstations are expected to reach $2.8 billion by 2025. To date, the majority of research on sit-stand workstations has been from the perspective of the user, i.e., the individual employee. However, it is also important to understand their use and implementation from the perspective of the decision maker responsible for their purchase. One of our outstanding BeUpstanding PhD candidates, Haroun Zerguine, has conducted research to address this evidence gap. His findings, which have been published in Applied Ergonomics (here and here), are summarised below. What was done The study included an online survey as well as interviews with…

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