BeUpstanding™ Blog

The Evidence

All Bite size facts Key resources Latest evidence Tips and tools

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…

Keep Reading

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…

Keep Reading

“Aus-First Study Shows Cost-Effective Way to Reduce Office Sitting Time”

Latest evidence

An Australian first study, written by Dr Lan Gao at Deakin University, shows how Australia can save BIG if companies invest in sit-stand desks for their employees. These findings are very exciting because they encourage workplaces to support workers to reduce their sitting levels and increase their movement at work. To learn more, check out the media release here, or you can read the full article in the Scandinavian Journal of Work, Environment & Health.

Keep Reading
The good news is, there are 'countermeasures'. Photo: StockSnap

Is sitting bad for us? There’s good and bad news

Latest evidence

The following article, written by Professor David Dunstan – one of our BeUpstanding Academic team members – was originally published in The New Daily on June 25, 2018. As you read this, what are you doing right now? If you’re sitting down, scientists have some good and bad news. First, the bad news. The way most adults work has steadily changed over recent decades. While in many ways our workplaces are ‘safer’ from an occupational hazards perspective, it is now encouraged or even demanded that we spend large portions of our day sedentary (seated) – usually with our eyes glued to some type of screen. While this is now the new norm, we simply weren’t built for such a stationary existence and, unsurprisingly, accumulating scientific evidence demonstrates that exposure to high amounts of sitting significantly increases the risk of premature death, heart disease and type 2 diabetes. Yes, you can help to reduce the risks associated with too much sitting if you undertake daily exercise, but unfortunately science tells us the best estimate of the amount of exercise required is equal to about 80 to 90 minutes per day of moderate-intensity activities (such as brisk walking) or 40 to 45…

Keep Reading

Standing For Brain Health

Latest evidence

A new cross-sectional study by Prabha Siddarth et al. found that the number of hours of sitting per day is inversely correlated with medial temporal lobe (MTL) thickness. In simpler terms, the more you sit, the thinner your MTL and its subregions (entorhinal cortex, parahippocampal cortex, and subiculum). This is important because the MTL plays a key role in memory function and a decrease in MTL has been linked to memory disorders such as Alzheimer’s disease. The study was conducted at UCLA in the Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior and participants consisted of middle-aged and older adults aged 45-75. Participants were extensively screened through the Mini-Mental State Examination, BMI, APOE genotyping, and the Hamilton Ration Scales for Depression and Anxiety. Participants were excluded if they had, “a lifetime history of dementia, major psychiatric or neurologic disorders, alcohol or substance abuse, head trauma or systemic disease affecting brain function, or uncontrolled hypertension or cardiovascular disease”, or if they had anxiety or depression disorders. Participants completed a validated self-reported questionnaire (The IPAQ-E) to record the amount of time spent sitting and in physical activity. In addition, each participant had an MRI scan to measure the MTL and its subregions. Statistical analysis of the MRI’s…

Keep Reading

What About Productivity?

Latest evidence

Often when we talk about sitting less, people get concerned about productivity. There’s a belief that to maximize work performance, you’ve got to be doing your work seated. However, just because you are standing up, sitting less, and moving more doesn’t mean your work productivity will decrease. Research often begins in the laboratory so let’s start there too. In one laboratory study, researchers found no differences in cognition when comparing standing to sitting. No differences were also found when examining computer mouse and keyboard performance. In terms of actual productivity measures, improvements have been shown when sitting was broken up with standing in a simulated office environment. Of course, work productivity in the laboratory might be different than productivity in your office. So, what happens when we look at productivity measured in actual workplaces? Overall, research has found that standing desks do not impact work productivity (examples 1, 2, and 3). In fact, in a recent study, we found some employees felt productivity actually improved! It’s not so cut and dry, though. Individual variability and job specific work tasks influence how much standing workstations impact productivity. It can take 2 weeks to adjust to a new workstation but standing can still…

Keep Reading

Reducing prolonged sitting in the long term – what are the heart health benefits?

Latest evidence

As you should hopefully know now if you have been following this blog, too much sitting, and in particular prolonged periods of sitting, can increase the risk of an early death. Replacing long periods of sitting with either standing or other physical activity has been shown to produce beneficial effects on a person’s glucose, insulin and lipid (or fat) metabolism in short term laboratory studies. But are there any additional health benefits that can be achieved when people manage to replace their prolonged periods of sitting long-term, and if so what are they? And are greater benefits seen for a person’s health when they replace sitting with stepping, not just standing? The Stand Up Australia research team set out to try and answer these questions by using a method known as compositional data analysis (CoDA). CoDA enables the researchers to simultaneously look at all activities a person does in a 24-hr period, and how this activity distribution is related to the person’s cardio-metabolic biomarkers, such as body weight and cholesterol to name a few. This is the first study to use the CoDA method within the context of a sitting-reduction intervention, and it was published in the March issue of…

Keep Reading

Benefits to heart health of reducing workplace sitting

The Evidence

We know that significant reductions in workplace sitting are achievable. But how does reducing sitting impact on workers’ health? We examined this using data from our Stand Up Victoria intervention  – a 12 month intervention in office workers that used organizational-, environmental- (including sit-stand workstations) and individual-level approaches to reduce prolonged workplace sitting time in desk-based workers. What did we do? We recruited 14 work teams and over 200 workers (136 intervention; 95 control) from the one organisation to take part in this cluster randomised controlled trial. We measured 14 biomarkers of body composition, blood pressure, glucose metabolism, lipid metabolism and a composite overall cardio-metabolic risk score in both the intervention and control participants at three time points: before the intervention, after three months of the intervention (end of the intensive intervention phase), and after 12 months. What did we find? We found a significant, beneficial intervention effect for fasting glucose and the clustered metabolic risk score at the 12 month assessment. This beneficial effect for fasting glucose was mainly due to the control group getting worse over the 12 months. There were no significant intervention effects observed at 3 months. Notably, sitting was primarily replaced with standing. What does this…

Keep Reading

Policies relating to occupational sedentary behaviour?

Latest evidence

Your workplace is likely to have policies regarding leave, fire safety, employment conditions, etc. etc. but what about sedentary work? Dr Pieter Coenen led a qualitative review of existing national and international occupational safety and health policies relating to occupational sedentary behaviour. He concluded that although there were no occupational authority policies that focused specifically on sedentary behaviour, there were a relevant aspects of existing policies that could be modified to address occupational sedentary behaviour. Do you have a policy addressing occupational sitting in your workplace? Please share your story with us.

Keep Reading
Navigate