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How Many Hours a Day Should You Spend on Your Feet?
New research on standing points to a minimum daily goal
London’s bright-red double-decker buses are one of the city’s hallmarks. Seventy years ago, those buses and their operators were at the center of one of the first occupational studies to examine the role of sitting on health.
Back then, each bus had a driver and a conductor. For a 1954 study, researchers at London’s transportation department examined the heart-disease incidence among these and other transit workers.
The researchers found that conductors, who spent most of the day on their feet collecting fares, were about 25% less likely than the seated drivers to develop heart disease. The conductors also tended to experience milder forms of heart trouble.
By today’s standards, that study was riddled with methodological flaws. But it was one of the first papers to suggest that a sedentary occupation could lead to health problems. These days, many more people spend the workday behind a desk, and the risks of immobility are now far better mapped.
Researchers have found that spending most of your day seated increases your risk for heart disease, death, some cancers, and metabolic diseases such as obesity and Type 2 diabetes. If you have a chronic pain condition — such as rheumatoid arthritis — too much sitting can make it worse. Sedentary behaviors have also been linked to mood disorders.
Among experts, there’s some ongoing disagreement about whether sitting is really the problem; some argue that sedentary time is just a marker of inactivity and that too little exercise is the real culprit. While not all the research on sitting is consistent, taken together, this body of evidence strongly suggests that too much time in a chair is risky even if you get regular exercise.
“It seems that insulin sensitivity is better with daily standing time over two hours.”
I was working at Men’s Health magazine when the “sitting is the new smoking” research started to get widespread attention. For a lot of us in that office, the solution was obvious: buy a standing desk.
