standing desk

Working from home looks a bit different for our animal companions than it does for us humans. Image courtesy Bruno Cervera on Unsplash.

How are you faring? Here in California, we’re still squarely in shelter-in-place mode, perhaps settling into “normal-for-now.” Some people, whose professions allow it and who didn’t already work remotely, are still acclimating to the experience of working from home full-time. How can we optimize our home work environments?

I recently had a discussion with a friend of mine who’s a full-time writer: let’s call him “Steve.” Steve recently decided to have someone build him a new writing desk to specs, and was curious to get my take on how to make sure his new desk, and home working environment more generally, is supportive of healthy posture.

What’s the best desk height?
Steve: My first concern is desk height. My laptop is a smallish one with a 13-inch display, so the screen doesn’t extend very high up from a desk surface. My existing desk feels low to me and is 29 inches tall. Apparently the industry standard is 29-30 inches. Is 29 inches too low or do I need a taller desk, especially if I’m working with my relatively low screen height? If I have a smaller display, do I need a desk which compensates by being 31 or 32 inches tall?

Esther Gokhale (EG): as long as the screen doesn’t induce your upper body to curve forward, it’s fine to have your screen lower than your eye level. Your eyes are perfectly capable of looking down to that degree without causing strain. The key thing is not a number, but rather what is happening in your body. Some people use floor-sitting desks that are only 6 inches off the ground perfectly well because they have good form while doing so. A custom-height desk as tall as 31 or 32 inches off the ground isn’t necessary unless it’s for comfort.

Floor-sitting with a wedge lets me comfortably use my Bellicon trampoline as a low desk.

How high should my monitor be?
Steve: Is the screen being 2 or 3 inches below eye level a problem? With my current desk height, I have to look slightly down at my display while writing. Should I be worried about the possibility of neck and back strain if I’m looking down that much and for that long?

EG: That sounds perfect, actually. Think hunter-gatherer: the line of vision would slant down since you have to be looking for animal tracks, signs of buried tubers, and watching where you step. Our bodies are perfectly capable of this behavior as they’ve been doing it for many millennia.

90-degree knees?
Steve: I’m curious about knee angle. I’ve heard that my knees should create a 90-degree angle while sitting. Is this true?

EG: There’s no research I know of that says this. People like even numbers and just make them up, even if they rarely exist in the complexity of nature and biology — parallel lines, 90-degree angles, etc. This reminds me for some reason of how rhino horns are supposed to be an aphrodisiac.

Humans are skilled at pattern recognition, which sometimes predisposes us to make conceptual leaps not grounded in fact when we see patterns that aren’t really there (i.e. rhino horns being thought of as an aphrodisiac). Part of the cultural baggage of having looked so strongly to Ancient Greece during the “Enlightenment” era of European history is a somewhat reductive expectation for symmetry and geometry, not only in the field of mathematics, but also in the human body. (More on that in another blog post.) In any case, worrying about human knees always being at a 90-degree angle while seated is not really a concern of mine. In fact, externally rotating the legs is a more constructive goal, and one among many other posture nuggets you can learn to achieve in our online posture coaching courses.

It’s also worth mentioning that, for seated desk work, the chair we painstakingly designed is both conducive to good posture and extremely durable. I’ve had mine for around 10 years and it’s still in great repair.

Modifying my laptop height with books, coming in close to the computer, and keeping my shoulders in a healthy position help make this seated desk arrangement gentle on the body, as well as sustainable. And with my decade-old Gokhale Pain-Free™ Chair, I can actually stretchsit while I work.

Keyboard placement: what’s the right distance?
Steve: How important is it that I be able to come in close to the keyboard?

EG: Very. Though your arms are certainly capable of reaching out to a more distant keyboard, this takes more muscular effort. If you have the choice, come in super close — the feeling wants to be almost like you're surrounded by your desk or as though you're in a cockpit. When the keyboard is further away, this can easily play into old habits of curving the upper back forward, craning the neck forward, or displacing the shoulders forward, all of which compromise the body.

Standing desks: what’s the best approach?
Steve: I want to fashion a standing workspace out of my new seated desk. I figure I’ll probably get an additional place-on-top appliance to make the desk work for standing as well as sitting.

EG: I use a simple wooden footstool on top of my massage table when I want a standing desk — I just place my laptop on the stool and work away.

This simple footstool on top of my massage table is my preferred standing desk setup.

Sometimes my Congolese drum can be useful too, but it’s not really stable enough. Whatever you use doesn’t have to be formal — just a nice height.

My Congolese drum is another option for a standing desk surface.

The home work space posts on the Twitter thread started by @julesforrest illustrate this nicely.

Whatever your creative desk arrangement, make sure you use healthy posture while standing — tallstanding comes to mind. Get creative and experiment: changing your work location and/or position can inject a fresh burst of energy into your day. Give it a try!

Sitting has been much maligned in the last decade. News sources love to dramatize the issue, and you can find many alarming headlines—such as, “Sitting will kill you, even if you exercise” from CNN in 2015. The debate about the various risks of sitting and possible ways to mitigate them is raging, and articles and research range from “sitting is the new smoking” to “sitting isn’t actually bad for you.”

 
Sitting: is it bad for you?

In the last few years, some research has seemed to backtrack or qualify the fears of the past, making a distinction between sitting for work versus sitting in front of the TV; news articles have begun to note the higher risks of sitting for those who are obese or inactive, and the potentially minimal risks of sitting for otherwise healthy adults. Just two years after telling us that sitting will kill us, CNN now claims, “Sitting might not be so bad for you after all.” There are also studies now suggesting that standing presents its own risks and problems including hospitalization due to varicose veins and inreased risk of atherosclerosis. In any case, studies show that after one month, users of standing desks return to sitting. 

People have been spending long hours each day sitting before the rise of ailments like heart disease and diabetes—is sitting really so bad for us? 

So what are we to believe? Do we sit, or stand—or are both harmful? You have to earn your living some way, and if it’s not going to be sitting, it’s going to be standing. All the back-and-forth in the media might have you believe the trendy guideline “the best position is the next position.” To me, this is a rather defeatist take on the human body. I believe all positions are good for you—if done with good posture, and in moderation.

Many famous thinkers can be quoted on the benefits of sitting calmly.

What is overlooked in all the studies and articles on the subject, is our sitting form and our furniture. Beyond one article that explored the benefits of sitting reclined, which is a relaxing but not a very practical posture, the medical literature seldom touches on how people sit, what they sit on, and what difference these can make to health and back pain. 

Bad furniture can contribute to harmful sitting, but even the best-shaped furniture can’t force you into a good posture. Compare the woman on the left, sitting with a tucked pelvis and rounded spine, to the woman on the right who uses the seat shape to her advantage, stacking her spine effortlessly on top of an anteverted pelvis.

In my experience, a person’s posture, what the person is doing while sitting, and what they are sitting on makes a huge health difference, both through correlated factors and through causation. Sitting with poor posture, whether from habit or from bad furniture, has many negative side effects, from causing joint and muscle pain in the back (and as we know, chronic back pain can bring down your mood and keep you from being active), to limiting lung capacity and circulation, which hinders the body’s ability to heal, remove toxins, and circulate oxygen. Even just being able to breath more deeply can have wonderful effects on physical and mental health, boosting energy, digestion, and mood. All these processes are linked, and when one suffers, it is no surprise that other weak spots in a person’s system can take a big hit, even to the extent of increasing the risk of health issues like heart disease or diabetes.

Sitting slouched all day will leave this surgeon tired and in pain, and less able to effectively help others. 

Apart from these direct effects, someone who sits with good form may be more likely to practice other beneficial health habits, like daily exercise and eating a healthy diet; while someone in the habit of sitting in front of the TV, unmoving for hours at a time is likely to harbor other unhealthy habits.

Sitting with good form can allow you to enjoy other activities that enrich your life and help you maintain mental and physical health.

These women in Burkina Faso are both working and relaxed as they sit for several hours spinning cotton. 

This baby naturally sits with good posture, and surely does not find it tiring or uncomfortable in the least. 

So wave goodbye to your anxiety about whether your desk job or your 3-hour seminar are going to give you health woes. Work on your form, maintain healthy habits like daily exercise and limited TV-watching (or other forms of lazy sitting), and take frequent breaks to move around and get your heart rate up a little. Sitting is a natural human activity, and your body is strong enough to handle moderate amounts of any position, when it’s done well.

 
Sometimes, simply by sitting, the soul collects wisdom.
- Zen proverb

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In the modern debate about whether to sit, stand or jiggle behind your desk all day, there is little examination of how we might improve our base positions as opposed to escape them. “The best position is the next position” exemplifies the common admission of hopelessness in finding any healthy base position.

In my view, all base positions have merits, and done with good form in moderation, are healthy and sustainable. Let us examine how we might improve each of our desk positions.

Sitting

The act of sitting has come under the gun in recent years. There are studies showing that sitting for extended periods of time, even when supplemented with sporadic exercise, does lasting damage to a person’s health. But people have sat for millennia, weaving baskets, sewing clothes, preparing meals, and talking story.  Might it be that the way we sit is a key determiner in just how bad sitting is for us? Most people today slump or tense as they sit – this severely compromises circulation, breathing and digestion as well as musculoskeletal health. With stacksitting and stretchsitting, the health profile of sitting looks quite different. It would be interesting to see a study done on people who more closely approximate our ancestors in their sitting form and who also incorporate a more traditional pattern of breaking to stand, walk (maybe dance?)

In any case, some things just need to be done sitting – sharing a meal with your family, nursing your baby, relaxing with a movie, or travelling by car, plane or bus. Most of us find that clearer, deeper and more focused thinking is possible when we sit, and that we are less distracted when not having to navigate the physical world around us.

So, rather than abandoning or feeling guilty about sitting, I suggest we improve our form when we have to or want to sit. And maybe sitting, like some other previously maligned activities like exposure to sun and consuming fat, will turn out to have some overlooked benefits and/or be good if done in a healthy fashion.

We refer you to the techniques of stretchsitting:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n9CDhcVTAdc

and stacksitting:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vkWtO6He7VM

Standing

Standing has come in favor amongst the ergo pundits of the day. Unfortunately most people are not comfortable standing for long periods of time. Their feet or backs hurt, they develop varicose veins, or they get tired. Most people can relate to not being comfortable for long periods of time spent standing in museums.

In fact, the most common ways of standing with locked knees and groin and weight thrust forward on the foot, damage not only the feet, knees and hips, but the entire spine through the neck. The exaggerated spinal curves that result from a forward thrust and tucked pelvis threaten every disc and spinal nerve root in the body, with the cervical and lumbar levels being the most vulnerable.

The example of the Inuit seal hunter is inspiring in this context. He has to stand for long periods without moving (to not frighten away prey) in extreme weather conditions. And he isn’t tired, achy or damaged from this. Standing can be done for long periods! 

Tallstanding, as we teach it, is one of the more challenging things to learn from a book or even DVD. When we teach this technique in our Foundations course, it takes several lessons for people to accept that the strange-feeling new way of being upright is not orangutan-esque and ridiculous. It takes looking in a mirror to convince most students that though they feel weird, they don’t look weird (and that in fact they look better than usual!) So for this technique, beyond studying 8 Steps and the DVD Back Pain: The Primal Posture Solution, we refer you to our basic course, where standing is first introduced in Lesson 3 of six lessons.

Treadmill desks

The latest trend in office furniture includes exercise machines. Workers are encouraged to walk or jog on treadmills while they push the company agenda forward.

Whereas it is clearly better to have exercise than not, I wonder whether we wouldn’t be better off encouraging people to walk, run and move from time to time for selected work tasks rather than simulating those behind a desk in an office setting. And I wonder whether it isn’t critical that, whether the jogging and exercising is done behind a desk or away from it, it be done in a posture-friendly manner.

At home, my family has a table tennis table parked in the living room that my husband and I use for breaks from work or for work-related discussions. I find it helps on many levels – it provides whole body exercise (it provides stretch, strength, cardiovascular stimulation), mental stimulation, eye-hand co-ordination, competitive edge (testosterone zip?), and plain fun and connection.

For some of my long distance meetings, I walk the neighborhood with my cell phone and headphones (thank you, modern technology).

With one of my colleagues I often turn on Brazilian music and “meet” over dance. Again, the benefits are numerous and diverse. I hope one day to influence more corporations to encourage posture-friendly dance-outs. I think they would provide a perfect complement to the gravity of the work environment.

Meanwhile, in writing this newsletter, I’m glad to have a regular desk, a comfortable chair and my thoughts focused and uncluttered. I edited the newsletter doing a little samba at my kitchen counter. I’d love to hear about your experiments in working, moving and getting comfortable.

Best,
Esther