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Forget Standing Desks: To Stay Healthy, You’ve Got To Move All Day

Latest evidence

The following article, written by Christopher Keyes, was published by The Guardian on February 6th, 2019. If you want to dedicate yourself to a lifetime of good habits, don’t start at the gym. Start at the office. 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. 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,…

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Sitting for More Than 13 Hours a Day May Sabotage the Benefits of Exercise

Latest evidence

The following article, written by Gretchen Reynolds, was originally posted by the New York Times on April 10, 2019. Sitting for most of the day could make us resistant to the usual metabolic benefits of exercise, according to a small but worrying new study. The findings, in the Journal of Applied Physiology, suggest that inactivity may alter our bodies in ways that are not just unhealthy on their own but also blunt the healthfulness of exercise. We know, of course, that physical activity is good for us and being sedentary, for the most part, is not. Regular exercise reduces the risk of heart disease, Type 2 diabetes and many other chronic conditions. Even a single workout can improve our metabolisms, studies show, so that we burn fat more efficiently after meals and keep our blood sugar and insulin levels steady. Inactivity, meanwhile, has almost the opposite physiological effects. People who spend most of their waking hours sitting face heightened risks for many chronic diseases. They often also experience metabolic problems that raise the risk of diabetes and heart disease, including insulin resistance, poor blood sugar control and high levels of triglycerides, the fatty acids from food that linger in the blood…

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Can sitting less decrease your risk of heart disease?

Latest evidence

The following article, written by Gautam Ramesh, Andrea LaCroix, and John Bellettiere, was originally published on February 25, 2019 in The Conversation. You can read the original article here. Too much sitting has long been criticized for contributing to premature mortality, Type 2 diabetes, and a host of other illnesses. In a new study of 5,638 women, we looked at how sedentary behavior was related to future cardiovascular disease (CVD). The results showed that those who were most sedentary had the highest risk for having a future CVD event. We also found that women who most often interrupted their sedentary time to stand up and move had significantly lower risk for CVD than women who sat for long stretches of time without standing up. The results persisted even after accounting for other common factors linked with CVD such as age, overall health, blood pressure and cholesterol. CVD includes heart attacks, strokes, heart failure and other diseases concerning the heart and blood vessels. It is the leading cause of death in the U.S., accounting for 1 in 4 deaths annually. Our findings, along with the research discussed below, provides strong evidence that sitting too much is an important factor to consider for heart…

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Discovery Interviews: What are they, why we are doing them, and what have we found?

Latest evidence

The BeUpstanding™ team have recently been out and about talking to and interviewing champions, potential champions, teams, and workplaces about their experience of taking part in BeUpstanding. Today we are going to take a look at what discovery interviews are, what they are used for, and why we are doing them. Most importantly we are going to share some of the interesting things that we found. What are discovery interviews? Discovery interviews have one main purpose – and that is for the researcher (or product development team) to understand how the end user is actually using a product. In our case, they are giving us insights into why organisations and champions are taking up BeUpstanding, or why they might consider taking it up, as well as the barriers and facilitators to success. In this round of interviews, our discovery process has involved in-depth interviews with government departments, mining, and fast moving consumer goods (FMCG) companies, as well as on-site observations of work teams, both before and after putting BeUpstanding into practice. Over the past several months we have conducted numerous interviews. We deliberately chose teams with varying levels of engagement with BeUpstanding. We interviewed teams that were actively using the…

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Health Check: do we really need to take 10,000 steps a day?

News and Events

The following article, written by Corneel Vandelanotte, Kerry Mummery, Mitch Duncan, and Wendy Brown, was originally published in The Conversation on February 6th, 2019. You can read the original article here. Regular walking produces many health benefits, including reducing our risk of heart disease, type 2 diabetes and depression. Best of all, it’s free, we can do it anywhere and, for most of us, it’s relatively easy to fit into our daily routines. We often hear 10,000 as the golden number of steps to strive for in a day. But do we really need to take 10,000 steps a day? Not necessarily. This figure was originally popularised as part of a marketing campaign, and has been subject to some criticism. But if it gets you walking more, it might be a good goal to work towards. Where did 10,000 come from? The 10,000 steps concept was initially formulated in Japan in the lead-up to the 1964 Tokyo Olympics. There was no real evidence to support this target. Rather, it was a marketing strategy to sell step counters. There was very little interest in the idea until the turn of the century, when the concept was revisited by Australian health promotion researchers in 2001 to encourage people to be more active. Based on…

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Global Action Plan on Reducing Physical Inactivity

The Evidence

The World Health Organisation (WHO) has recently released a Global Action Plan on physical activity with the aim of reducing physical inactivity by 10% by 2025, and by 15% by 2030. To support this goal they have developed 4 main objectives: Create active societies: “Create a paradigm shift in all of society by enhancing knowledge and understanding of, and appreciation for, the multiple benefits of regular physical activity, according to ability and at all ages.”1 Create active environments: “Create and maintain environments that promote and safeguard the rights of all people, of all ages, to have equitable access to safe places and spaces, in their cities and communities, in which to engage in regular physical activity, according to ability.”1 Create active people: “Create and promote access to opportunities and programmes, across multiple settings, to help people of all ages and abilities to engage in regular physical activity as individuals, families and communities.”1 Create active systems: “Create and strengthen leadership, governance, multisectoral partnerships, workforce capabilities, advocacy and information systems across sectors to achieve excellence in resource mobilization and implementation of coordinated international, national and subnational action to increase physical activity and reduce sedentary behaviour.”1 The reduction of sedentary behaviour is included in objective…

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What is the link between Stress, Team Cohesion, and BeUpstanding™?

Latest evidence

At team BeUpstanding™, we are not only interested in how our program impacts on raising awareness, building culture, and changing behaviour to support workers to stand up, sit less, and move more, but also on its broader impact on health, productivity and wellbeing. The following blog is written by Jemieca Loeffler who undertook her honours with the BeUpstanding™ team here at the University of Queensland. She worked with some of our amazing champions and teams taking part in BeUpstanding™ to find out in a bit more detail if there was any impact of the program on occupational stress and group cohesion. What she found was that the more stressed employees were and the more cohesive they felt with their team, the less time they spent sitting at work and the more likely they were to engage in BeUpstanding™.  Sound interesting? Read below to find out more! Some background info As we know, prolonged sitting can be detrimental for our health, and many of us fall victim to this public health concern through our jobs. A study by Thorpe et al. showed that call centre workers, in particular, are at highest risk of sedentariness, spending up to 90% of their work day sitting,…

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US Physical Activity Guidelines (2nd Edition) Now Available

The Evidence

Have you heard? The U.S. Department of Health and Human services (USDHHS) recently released the updated guidelines on physical activity. As first reported by the USDHHS, here are the “Top 10 Things to Know About the Second Edition of the Physical Activity Guidelines for Americans” (psst make sure you check out #6). The second edition of the Physical Activity Guidelines for Americans provides evidence-based recommendations for adults and youth ages 3 through 17 to safely get the physical activity they need to stay healthy. There are new key guidelines for children ages 3 through 5 and updated guidelines for youth ages 6 through 17, adults, older adults, women during pregnancy and the postpartum period, adults with chronic health conditions, and adults with disabilities. The new key guidelines for children ages 3 through 5 state that preschool-aged children should be active throughout the day to enhance growth and development. Adults caring for children this age should encourage active play (light, moderate, or vigorous intensity) and aim for at least 3 hours per day. The recommended amount of physical activity for youth ages 6 through 17 is the same. Each day, youth ages 6 through 17 need at least 60 minutes of moderate-to-vigorous activity to attain the most…

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Hot Off The Press – Our Test Version of the BeUpstanding™ Champion Toolkit Worked!

Latest evidence

Prior to going live with the BeUpstanding™ program that you see now, our research team tested whether using an online toolkit to guide workplace champions to deliver the BeUpstanding™ intervention was even going to work. The findings of this test version in terms of how champions used the toolkit and the impact of the program have just been published in the Journal of Medical Internet Research Formative Research, while our findings on the acceptability of the test version will be published soon in Health Promotion International. A little background info Did you know that the BeUpstanding™ Champion Toolkit is based off of a previous intervention called Stand Up Australia? Stand Up Australia was evaluated in a cluster randomised controlled trial in workers in Victoria and was shown to be effective and acceptable to both employers and employees. However, the Stand Up Australia intervention, which was delivered by the research team and included sit-stand workstations, seminars, activity tracking, and one-on-one health coaching as part of the intervention, was resource intensive and wasn’t ready for workplaces to just use. The BeUpstanding™ program is the translation of the Stand Up Australia intervention, and was designed to be a low cost / no cost option to support more work teams to…

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The Stone Age Brain and How it Affects Our Physical Activity Levels

Latest evidence

Our physical activity levels have never been lower – can we look to our Homo sapiens ancestors for answers?  We live in a rapidly changing environment with technology defining the modern world we live in. An increase in tasks and jobs automation has led to a vastly different workplace than what we have previously known. Workplaces are now sedentary by nature and require far less energy output as before. The low activity life we have had to adopt is not healthy nor happy. But are there explanations for our ill health in the modern environment which would explain why change is so difficult? Humans have evolved to respond to behaviour triggers like hunger, thirst, and tiredness with behaviours which overcome these desires. These basic instincts worked to keep us alive in the ancestral environment where food, water, and shelter were competitive resources to have and to obtain. By instinctually knowing you were hungry, thirsty or tired, it meant you were able to provide for yourself and keep yourself healthy in harsh environments. These are not instincts we have lost, we still feel hungry, thirsty and tired, and we feel them daily. However, the environment in which we live has changed…

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