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What is the goldilocks for sitting and standing time?

Latest evidence

A recent article from the Conversation showcased research from team members reporting on findings that explored one of the common questions asked in BeUpstanding – namely – what is the right balance between sitting and standing? The article was written by lead author Dr Christian Brakenridge and the original Conversation article was published on May 2nd, 2024. How much time should you spend sitting versus standing? New research reveals the perfect mix for optimal health The Conversation, Gorodenkoff/Shutterstock Christian Brakenridge, Swinburne University of Technology People have a pretty intuitive sense of what is healthy – standing is better than sitting, exercise is great for overall health and getting good sleep is imperative. However, if exercise in the evening may disrupt our sleep, or make us feel the need to be more sedentary to recover, a key question emerges – what is the best way to balance our 24 hours to optimise our health? Our research attempted to answer this for risk factors for heart disease, stroke and diabetes. We found the optimal amount of sleep was 8.3 hours, while for light activity and moderate to vigorous activity, it was best to get 2.2 hours each. Finding the right balance Current health…

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How to motivate your team and keep them motivated

Latest evidence

You are the nominated Champion for your work’s BeUpstanding challenge. Congratulations! But, now you are wondering how to keep your team motivated to stick with it. How will your communications help your team feel driven to see out the challenge to the end? Fortunately, there’s more that you could consider in addition to the helpful resources, reminders and shout-outs at morning meetings. We’ve applied a theory that provides an effective way of supporting sustained motivation as a leader, and adapted the approach to best suit your role as a BeUpstanding Champion. Consider this – if you had all the money you needed to survive and be content for the rest of your life, would you still do some form of work? It wouldn’t be unreasonable to say “no”, if your primary reason for working was to earn an income to sustain your living. If you thought “yes”, what would be your reason for wanting to continue working, when the need to earn money or status is no longer a driving factor? Thanks to Self-Determination Theory (or SDT) co-founders, Richard Ryan and Edward Deci, we’re able to understand how different types of human motivation drives our behaviour. Ryan and Deci formulated…

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Finding your ‘why’ for moving more at work

Latest evidence

This won’t be like most articles that you’re used to reading online. You won’t find 6 quick steps to feeling more motivated to reduce sedentary time at work. You won’t see expert secrets that promise “one strategy to unlocking your inner drive”. What you might find is something more valuable to you as an individual. Because the reality is, we’re all just too different for there to be one motivation to change. No one thinks and experiences the world quite like you do. What motivates you to move more at work, may not be the same thing that motivates your colleague, team leader or morning coffee buddy. In a world where we’re loaded with information about what we should and shouldn’t do, we could probably do with a bit more “why” time. So, we’ve parked the “what” for now and instead focused on ways for you to consider your own internal motivators. This is a way to help you to find your own, individual ‘why’ for reducing the sedentary time and moving more at work. If you’re still reading, it’s likely that you’re thinking about changing your sedentary time at work. Or at the very least, you’re curious about whether…

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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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Moving for your mind

Latest evidence

We’ve all heard that moving is good for our bodies and that the more we do it, the better. Being active not only supports circulatory, muscular and skeletal system health, helping to make us fitter and stronger, it also has the power to reduce the likelihood of some cancers developing. So, what about our minds? What happens to our mental wellbeing when we are physically active? It turns out, exercise can play a key role in reducing the symptoms of anxiety and depression. Even for moderate to severe cases of depression or for those experiencing chronic health or neurological conditions, where the risk of developing depression is greater. Exercise can also help with improving our sleep quality, which can be impacted by depression and anxiety. And whilst engaging in regular physical activity in leisure time not only helps to reduce symptoms of depression in adults, it may even play a role in preventing depression from developing. So, how much physical activity is ‘enough’? And can we count the house-work? The Australian Government recommends that the average adult should aim for 2.5 to 5 hours of moderate intensity physical activity each week or 1.25 to 2.5 hours of vigorous intensity…

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Maximise your health: programs to help get you started

Key resources

Did you know, in addition to BeUpstanding, there are a number of other health promotion programs that are freely available? Here are 9 health promotion programs that you can implement at your workplace, and 10 programs you can take part in individually. Workplace Health Programs BeUpstanding If you are a reader of this blog, hopefully you are very familiar with the BeUpstanding program – which supports desk-based workers to sit less and move more. As a BeUpstanding champion, you are provided everything you need through the online toolkit to take up, deliver and evaluate the program within your team. The program is suitable for all desk-based workers, no matter where they are working, with the ultimate aim to build a dynamic culture where sitting less and moving more is the norm. If you haven’t run BeUpstanding yet, or if it has been over a year since you ran it last, why not sign up now. Queensland Healthy Kids Menu Initiative Do you work in a café, restaurant, hotel or club and wish to provide healthier options for children? Consider signing up to the Queensland Healthy Kids Menu initiative. After signing up and submitting your healthy  kids menu, you will be given promotional…

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How AI can help your team to BeUpstanding

BeUpstanding Stories

OpenAI and their program ChatGPT is a gamechanger in how information is synthesised and delivered. While big issues, such as the implications of the program on the future of work are under discussion, for BeUpstanding champions, it provides a great opportunity to easily get ideas to help your team sit less and move more. We decided to put the program to the test. We asked: What are ideas for a standing meeting? The program wrote:  There are several ideas for conducting standing meetings: Hold the meeting in a standing-only area, such as a standing desk or a huddle room, to encourage participants to stay on their feet. Use a whiteboard or flipchart for brainstorming and note-taking, which allows participants to move around and engage with the material in a more active way. Incorporate movement into the meeting, such as taking a short walk outside or doing a quick stretching routine. Use standing or standing-height tables for seating, this will make it less comfortable to sit and encourage standing. Use a timer to remind participants to stand up and move around during the meeting, or to take short breaks. Make it a walking meeting, where participants walk and talk while discussing…

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A Menu of Strategies to Reduce Sitting and Promote Activity

Latest evidence

It has been well established that high levels of sitting can negatively impact on health and wellbeing, including increasing the risk of cardiovascular disease, diabetes and cancer. Workplace sitting time has been recognised as an emergent occupational health and safety risk, with research now dedicated to finding effective, feasible and cost-effective strategies to reduce sitting time and promote activity. To date, only two studies (Brakenridge et al. 2018; Stephens et al., 2018), have evaluated sitting-reduction strategy use in workplace interventions and the effectiveness of strategy selection on behaviour change outcomes.  Both these studies are authored by members of the BeUpstanding team: Dr Charlotte Brakenridge and Dr Samantha Stephens. What were these studies about? These two studies evaluated what strategies workers chose during the intervention, and whether these strategies led to reductions in sitting time and/or increases in activity. Dr Brakenridge worked collaboratively with a workplace champion at one large organisation to understand the impact of organisational support, wearable technology, as well as other behaviour change strategies, on workplace sitting and activity time. Within this study, the workplace champion delivered the intervention and provided support to promote the strategies, specifically: walking meetings; standing in meetings and using the stairs instead of…

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How 2 minute activity breaks during the workday can reduce your risk of cardiovascular disease

Latest evidence

In a typical week in the office, workers on average can spend 30 hours of their workday sitting, with much of this accrued in prolonged, unbroken bouts. Sedentary behaviours, such as sitting, increases ‘bad’ cholesterol (LDL–C), decreases ‘good’ cholesterol (HDL–C) levels and increases the risk of abnormal glucose metabolism. These physiological markers can contribute to an increased risk of cancer, cardiovascular disease mortality, and diabetes. Previous studies have found that regularly breaking up prolonged sitting with activity breaks can have benefit for these indicators of cardiometabolic health in a laboratory setting. However, the impacts of regular breaks in an office setting are less clear. One simple way to increase breaks in prolonged sitting is to schedule short 2-minute activity breaks throughout the day by climbing stairs. A recent pilot study published in BMC Public Health Journal investigated the feasibility of introducing prompted stair climbing exercise breaks into the workplace and assessed any resulting improvements in glucose and cholesterol levels. It also evaluated the acceptability of such activity as an interruption of their work. What was done? Over eight weeks, 16 sedentary office workers from the United Kingdom (five females) took part in this quasi-experimental research study. Blood samples were taken…

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New resources to support physical activity

Key resources

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services office of Disease Prevention and Health Promotion have released a new set of resources to help support everyone to be more active. As detailed on their website, the resources are part of the Move Your Way® campaign which was developed in 2018 to share the key recommendations from the second edition of the Physical Activity Guidelines for Americans. The resources include videos, fact sheets and an interactive activity planner tool and are written for consumers. They highlight simple steps and actionable tips for getting active, with the resources available in both English and Spanish. Resources are available for: Adults Older adults Pregnant and postpartum people Parents Check them out via this link. Images from the campaign are used in this blog article.

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