The importance of sitting and standing work.

Prevent neck pain

When you work at home all day at the kitchen table, you soon notice that you will get some more physical complaints. Our head is quite heavy, when you are working behind your laptop, your head hangs forward on our neck. To be able to compare it, you have to hold a thick book or an iPad in one hand, at first this seems to work, but the longer you hold the book it will become a lot heavier and your arm will slowly sink in. It is therefore important to ensure that the screen of your laptop or other monitor is almost at eye level. You put a lot less strain on your neck.

If you work seated, it is also very important that you have a good office chair. A chair that you can raise and lower, one that is also flexible in the backrest and where you can also adjust the armrests. You're in the right place if your legs are at about a 90-degree angle. Also with your arms, you should be able to relax your shoulders and your arms should be able to rest comfortably on the handrails. It is also important not to sit too much in your screen, this way you still have a bad posture for your neck.

Healthy influence

When you stand while working, the transport of oxygen and sugars to the brain is increased. This results in increased creativity and productivity, as evidenced by a study by Washington University.

Most of us are generally not very active in the office, so you would have to work up a sweat in the evening to burn some calories in the gym. When you're typing while sitting at your desk, you only burn 34 calories. But the moment you alternate between standing and sitting work, your heart pumps about 10 times as much blood through your body. So if you work standing up for a few hours, you burn about 145 calories.

You also get a less sleepy feeling than when you work standing up. Over the course of the day when you've been sitting so much, that sleepiness even negatively affects your work performance.

A study from the University of Missouri-Columbia shows that sitting too long without some variation from standing work negatively affects your metabolism. So much so that as an employee you run a greater risk of developing diabetes and heart disease. So you could say that by working more standing up, you can live longer.

Sports does not compensate

So we sit a lot. But what if you go to work by bike or exercise regularly? Then I'm moving anyway, would you think?

That is certainly true, but it is not entirely the right way to prevent the health effects of prolonged sitting. These are often developed because you sit for long periods of time. With this you actually put your body in a kind of standby mode. So it's about exercising regularly. That means that you have to be in motion for 2 minutes every half hour. Even if it's just a walk to the coffee machine or the toilet.