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 Australian office workers alternated between sitting and standing
every 30 minutes for a week and felt less fatigued and less back
pain and lower-leg pain than when they stayed seated the whole day.
“Our results confirm what we expected - that introducing regular
breaks across the workday leads to improvements in fatigue and
musculoskeletal symptoms compared to sitting all day,” said Alica A.
Thorp, a postdoctoral research fellow at the Baker IDI Heart and
Diabetes Institute in Melbourne, Australia, who led the study.
Prolonged sitting has been linked with a variety of health problems,
but office workers often have little choice about their work
environment. Past research has found office workers spend about 75
percent of their work day sitting in a chair, Thorp's team writes in
Occupational and Environmental Medicine.
The researchers set out to study various effects on health -
including joint and muscle pain - and on workers’ focus and
productivity of taking standing “breaks” during the day.
For the study, 17 men and six women were randomly assigned to one of
two groups. Everyone used an electric adjustable-height workstation,
but one group sat while working over the course of an eight-hour day
and the other alternated every 30 minutes between sitting and
standing.
The workers did this for five days, then during a second five-day
work week, the groups switched roles.
The participants were mostly middle-aged, 15 were overweight and the
rest were obese.
People in the sit-stand group, who adjusted the height of the table
as they stood up to work, wore a physical activity monitor on their
right thigh to gauge their sitting, standing and walking times.
On day five of each work week, everyone filled out questionnaires
measuring their fatigue levels, musculoskeletal discomfort, feelings
about their own productivity and how well they liked the adjustable
workstation.
People had an average fatigue score of 52.7 when they sit-stood
while working, compared to 67.8 when they sat all day. A score of 66
or more was considered an “elevated level” of fatigue compared to
what a healthy person would feel.
People in the sit-stand group also had 32 percent fewer
musculoskeletal symptoms in the lower back and 14 percent fewer in
their ankles and feet compared to when they sat all day.
Workers reported better focus and concentration while seated,
although work productivity did not differ significantly between the
two study groups. There was also a trend toward better productivity
and less impatience and irritability in the sit-stand group, the
researchers said.
The workstation was also much more pleasant overall for the
sit-stand groups, who rated their enjoyment of it at 81 out of 100,
versus a score of 64 for the sitting-only groups.
“While we didn’t see a statistically significant improvement in
productivity, the finding that intermittent standing across the
workday did not adversely affect worker’s productivity is
important,” Thorp told Reuters Health in an email.
“Given that we observed a significant reduction in fatigue levels
over five consecutive days, it is possible that over a longer period
of time this would have translated into a significant improvement in
productivity,” she said.
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Dorothy Dunlop, a professor of medicine at Northwestern University
Feinberg School of Medicine, said the study was a “wake-up call”
about the importance of physical activity for health, though too
small to gauge productivity or concentration.
“I think this is a promising study which adds important evidence
supporting the benefits of reduced sedentary behavior,” said Dunlop,
who wasn’t involved in the research. “To my knowledge, it’s the
first study showing well-documented reductions in sedentary behavior
are clearly tied to better outcomes,” she said.
“The Holy Grail will be finding interventions that can be sustained
over a long period of time and produce good long-term outcomes . . .
but this is a strong starting point,” said Dunlop, who studies
physical activity as a way to prevent disability in older adults.
“I think the evidence we’re starting to accumulate shows standing is
more beneficial than sitting and moving is more beneficial than
standing,” said Dunlop. “We want people to get up and move.”
To get moving in an office job, Dunlop suggested also walking over
to talk to colleagues rather than emailing, taking stairs instead of
elevators or standing during a phone call or meeting.
Another small study of the psychology of work environments recently
found that productivity may be enhanced in meetings where everyone
is standing (see Reuters Health story of June 20, 2014, here:
http://reut.rs/1m5u0Sh).
Dunlop noted, however, that more work was needed before a policy
change on continuous sitting in office jobs.
In addition to musculoskeletal problems, the Australian study was
primarily focused on risk factors for diabetes and heart disease, so
the researchers recruited only overweight and obese participants to
see if their risk for those conditions was worsened by sitting.
The study cannot say whether the back pain benefits would be the
same for normal-weight people or for those with back disorders more
severe than the mild aches caused by sitting for too long.
In general, though, Thorp said office workers should take an
exercise cue from the study, but cautioned against standing for more
than an hour, which can also cause fatigue and musculoskeletal
problems. She added that she hoped the study would help lead to
public policy changes in Australia that reduce workplace sedentary
time.
“The message for sedentary workers should be to alternate regularly
between sitting and standing across the work day for health,” Thorp
said.
SOURCE: http://bit.ly/1lWS4Oy Occupational and Environmental
Medicine, online August 28, 2014.
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