The International Society for Physical Activity and Health (ISPAH) has paired up with WHO to run a series of webinars based on the release of the WHO Guidelines on physical activity and sedentary behaviour. The latest one on the 4th March featured BeUpstanding principal investigator A/Prof Genevieve Healy as part of the line-up, talking about the evidence on how to reduce sedentary behaviour. Check out the video below. You can also catch the other webinars in the series at: https://www.ispah.org/resources/free-webinars/
In late 2020, the World Health Organisation released their guidelines on physical activity and sedentary behaviour. The development and/or updating of guidelines follows a clear protocol to ensure that the best available evidence is used. A full summary and explanation of the guidelines can be found here. For physical activity, it is recommended that all adults should undertake 150–300 min of moderate-intensity, or 75–150 min of vigorous-intensity physical activity, or some equivalent combination of moderate-intensity and vigorous-intensity aerobic physical activity, per week. Regular muscle-strengthening activity is also recommended. This is in line with what we have with our Australian guidelines. The big update for the 2020 WHO Guidelines was the inclusion of sedentary behaviour for the first time. In reviewing the evidence regarding the health impact of too much sedentary behaviour, it was concluded that higher amounts of sedentary behaviour in adults are associated with detrimental effects on all-cause mortality, cardiovascular disease mortality and cancer mortality and incidence of cardiovascular disease, type 2 diabetes and cancer. These are similar conclusions to what was reported for the scientific report for the US guidelines. For sedentary behaviour, the guidelines state that: Adults should limit the amount of time spent being sedentary. Replacing sedentary time…
In a previous article, we looked at how COVID-19 had impacted champions implementing the BeUpstanding program in the workplace. The snapshot survey found that working from a home environment, team communication, keeping staff motivated and increased workload during COVID-19 were the biggest challenges to implementing the program. Since COVID-19, 56% of champions reported their team had temporarily paused the program. In this article, we examine the impacts of COVID-19 on staff. Data were from a survey we sent in May 2020 to staff participating in the BeUpstanding program. The survey asked about sitting and activity behaviours, working arrangements, and health and wellbeing now and before COVID-19. Only staff whose teams were participating in the national implementation trial of the program, and who had already completed the needs assessment element of the program, were eligible. A total of 38 survey responses were received and are reported on below. Working Arrangements On average, staff worked approximately 40 hours/week before and during COVID-19. While there was no significant change in work hours, there was a major transition from working in the office to working from home with 97% working mostly or completely at the workplace pre COVID-19 and 87% reporting working mostly or…
A new report, funded by Wellcome, explores the potential health risks associated with high levels of occupational sitting and methods to reduce excessive sitting in the workplace or home working environment. Below is a summary of the report, taken from here. A full summary of the report can be found here, while a summary presentation of our key findings can be found here, and a podcast can be found here. BeUpstanding investigators David Dunstan and Genevieve Healy were co-authors on the report, which was led by Aaron Kandola. Full author list: Aaron Kandola, Jessica Rees, Brendon Stubbs, David W Dunstan, Genevieve N Healy, Joseph F Hayes Background Due to the rising prevalence of desk-based work, excessive sitting represents an emerging occupational health and safety issue. Employed adults are typically sitting for over 9 hours per day. Spending large periods of the day seated with insufficient active breaks increases the risk of several physical and mental health conditions, including depression and anxiety disorders. Allowing or facilitating excessive sitting in the workplace can affect employees’ mental health and compromise the duty of care between an employer and employee. Combatting excessive occupational sitting with regular breaks involving light activity for a couple of…
A few weeks ago, this blog discussed how gamification might be used to support workers to sit less and move more. In this blog, Duncan Robertson reports on the second part of his literature review, which examined common features that worked and didn’t work for gamification, as well as some key considerations used to change behaviour using this approach. What works Social contact & social contracts: Referring back to the first of the three key psychological principals discussed in my previous blog, there are several social methods used in interventions that work well. For example, peer support between participants helps everyone reach their goal. Additionally, accountability between participants goes back to individuals being more motivated by loses than gains. Clearly defined goals: Interventions must provide participants with a purpose for participating. Clearly deciding on a reachable goal helps maintain motivation and engagement. An intervention that has been designed well can regularly adapt goals based on participant progress. For example, ensuring goal difficulty increases with participants progress in order to always provide a challenging activity. Friendly competition: Friendly competition between participants is encouraged. This can come in the form of leaderboards or a points system that everyone can see or is…
Many people now work in office-based jobs, which can be highly sedentary. As high levels of sitting time are associated with increased mortality and chronic disease risk, there has been increasing interest in effective strategies to reduce sitting in workplaces. The spatial design of office environments may potentially influence sitting and other workplace behaviours. For example, people may sit more if they do not have other places to visit within the workplace, such as discussion spaces and meeting rooms. Office spatial design may also influence the frequency of informal face-to-face interactions with work colleagues by providing suitable places for conversations. Face-to-face interactions are considered important for improving the performance of knowledge-based workplaces. Given that workplace sedentary behaviour and face-to-face interactions may be associated with workplace health and productivity outcomes, identifying modifiable office spatial factors that can influence these behaviours can inform better office design. We conducted a systematic review to synthesise the evidence on links between office spatial design factors with workplace sitting and informal face-to-face interactions. What did we do? We searched six databases in November 2019 (before the COVID-19 pandemic began) for peer-reviewed articles that examined associations of office spatial design attributes with sitting or face-to-face interactions. We excluded…
Here at team BeUpstanding we are always looking for new ways to support workers to sit less and move more. You may have already read some previous blogs on this subject, like this article on mobile apps. In this next part of the blog series, Duncan Robertson, a final year UQ Bachelor of Health Science student, explores how gamification may be used to support behaviour change in the workplace. Read about his findings below. Diving into the literature To build a greater understanding of how gamification in the workplace works I took a deep dive into the literature. From thousands of results, 42 pieces of literature with value were found across nine databases, ranging from peer reviewed academic papers to grey literature, such as blog articles and opinion pieces. These were categorised into a table and colour coded based on the usefulness of each paper with green being most useful, yellow as average, red as not so much and grey aptly being used to designate any grey literature included. The search mainly focused on the term’s ‘gamification’, ‘workplace’ and ‘physical activity’. Several variations of aforementioned search terms were used to find specific points of data including ‘sedentary behaviour’ ‘usefulness’, ‘effectiveness’,…
These days there’s just about an app for everything, so what about an app that helps improve your health at the reach of your back pocket? One of the marvels of the 21st century, the smartphone has come to the limelight and with it, the plethora of mobile applications, or “apps” accessible at our fingertips. These days there’s just about an app for everything, setting your alarms, tracking your diet, searching the news, playing games; you name it, you got it. In the public health sphere, apps have also become an increasing area of interest, and at team BeUpstanding we have been exploring whether they might be a useful next step for helping work teams sit less and move more. At face value, mobile apps represent a very accessible and potentially cost-effective way of delivering health information and perhaps even more. As a result, there has been a boom in research regarding mobile applications and their effects on health outcomes. This article, written by Jason Lin as part his placement with the BeUpstanding team, provides a brief overview of the current evidence for mobile applications and what we might be able to look forward to in years to come. Scoping…
The coronavirus has rapidly changed the way we live and work. It has also exposed stark inequities between those who can work safely from their home and those who have to physically attend a workplace. This great animated article and thought piece from the BBC explores what the future may look like in a post-covid world.
Dr Ana Goode and A/Prof Genevieve Healy – the lead investigators on BeUpstanding – featured on the latest episode of the Physical Activity Researcher podcast – a Finnish initiative. They discuss the evidence that underpins BeUpstanding, the impact of COVID-19 on the program, and some simple strategies workplaces can do right away to start sitting less and moving more. Enjoy!
