Sitting vs Standing at Work - Which is Better?

We are a chair tethered society. We wake up, sit for breakfast, sit to drive to work, sit at work, sit and drive home, sit for dinner, sit on the couch and watch TV. The average American can easily sit for 9-15 hours/day.

Over 21 million people in office are in admin support occupations according to the BLS. This estimate doesn’t include people who are inactive in other industries such as transportation, architecture, engineering, sales, sciences, legal, and healthcare, just to name a few.

Sitting at work can account for 60% of total daily sitting time on a weekday, but even on weekends people still sit for 8 hours.

But prolonged standing is also bad! Stationary standing is correlated with extremely high incidence of low back pain, even in participants who had no prior history of low back discomfort.

People working in a fixed standing posture are at a significantly greater risk of cardiovascular disease, blood clots, varicose veins, leg cramps, leg swelling, pregnancy complications and birth defects than those working in a fixed sitting posture.

So what's the answer?

We do know for sure that light activity behaviors matter and recent findings show sitting is distinctly worse for the body than stationary standing due to observed protein and enzyme actions.

We believe the answer is to move, vary your positions throughout the day. In fact, we created an entire virtual training program around this concept called #Ergozombies - you can watch one of our training videos here.

If you have questions or are looking for solutions - contact us to discuss your challenges.