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You should stand in meetings – don’t worry about what others might think

Tips and tools

The following article, written by Benjamin Gardner, Lee Smith, and Louise Mansfield, was originally published in The Conversation on July 2, 2018. Standing in meetings may be good for our health, but it can also make those that are standing feel self-conscious, anxious about how others perceive them, and disengaged from the meeting. These findings, taken from our recent study, suggest that efforts to encourage office workers to sit less and move more must acknowledge the realities of the workplace that conspire to keep people chained to their seats. Sitting has been linked to adverse health outcomes, including increased risk of obesity, heart disease, some cancers, and poorer mental health. While some evidence suggests that the harms of sitting can be offset by at least one daily hour of moderate physical activity, this seems an unrealistic target. Most of the UK population fails to meet physical activity recommendations and spends prolonged periods sitting. Office workers, who make up half of the UK workforce, are particularly inactive. Our 2015 study of 164 London workers found that, on workdays, they sat for 10.5 hours of the 16 hours they spent awake. Breaking up sitting frequently with periods of standing and associated light activity can have important health…

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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…

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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…

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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…

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Healthier Workplaces WA BeUpstanding Lunch ‘N’ Learn

News and Events

Check out this amazing Lunch ‘N’ Learn seminar that Healthier Workplace WA held in November. It was led by Leon Straker who is a professor of Physiotherapy at the School of Physiotherapy and Exercise Science at Curtin University. As an expert in the field, Leon provides a thorough review of the benefits of moving more and sitting less, and the dangers of too much sitting. He also gives a great overview of the BeUpstanding™ Champion Toolkit, what it means to take part in BeUpstanding™, and how you can start your BeUpstanding™ journey today. Lunch ‘N’ Learn seminars are a fun and engaging way to educate the workforce about the benefits of taking part in BeUpstanding™. They can also help people understand how the initiative can fit into their workplace. If you hold a session like this please share it with us! We love to hear your experiences and feedback so we can learn from you!

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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…

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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.

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