Corporate Fitness Advise on Dangers of Your Work Station

Sitting is the New Smoking

If you passed by Infofit’s office, you’ll discover that in our fitness operation not only has sitting work stations but also standing desks too.

Not something for fitness focused people only, but demonstrated long before by the famous individuals such as Ernest Hemingway and Winston Churchill.

Stand-up Desks

Stand-up desks are the latest trend work station choice for corporate fitness offices. Why? There’s plenty of medical evidence that sitting is the new smoking. Being stationed sitting for hours uninterrupted can be extremely bad for your health…we are sitting to death.

• An editorial in the British Journal of Sports Medicine learned stationary sitting for prolonged periods has a substantially higher risk of disease than those who keep muscles moving, even in a non-exercise fashion, such as taking the stairs etc.
• Researchers at the University of Missouri learned that sitting seems to stop the circulation of lipase (a fat absorbing enzyme.)
• The American Journal of Epidemiology published a study showing that sitting or remaining stationary for long periods of time, exceeding 6 hours a day, increases the probability to die from sarcopenia, diabetes, heart disease and obesity by 18% versus those who did sat than 3 hours a day.
• The Pennington Biomedical Research Center in Louisiana found that people who sit for the majority of the day are more likely to die of heart disease by 54%.

These eye popping stats should help any office worker make a decision to improve their fitness, or for the true athlete, something we have not tried yet, the treadmill desk.

New stand-up desks are ready available found online or you can convert your desk as what we did. The switch over to a standing desk is easy and what we have found people say that they’ll never go back to chairs for any long period of time.

Proper Ergonomic Posture

But please note: even with the best of fitness intentions, stand-up desks can cause problems if they’re taken too far when standing is done all day and done incorrectly without proper ergonomic posture, there is an increased risk of musculoskeletal disorder like carpal tunnel syndrome.

Standing all day can increase the risk of varicose veins and put an additional load on the circulatory system. The best health and fitness advice is to alternate between standing and sitting work stations and develop a pattern of a variety of movements (e.g., walk your meeting, take the stairs).