Excerise cannot undo effects of prolonged sitting

If you are willing to make your own, very non fancy setup, you can have a standing station for quite cheap compared to a proper standing desk. You can use a custom made piece of wood to put on top of your current desk, use books, boxes, even soda cans :) https://www.flickr.com/photos/marcoarment/3234209861

Personally I like to alternate standing and sitting. Since this is not going to be an adjustable desk think about having a way of quickly repositioning monitor/laptop keyboard and mouse on 2 levels instead of just the standing level.

Refutes the headline? Only if you failed to RTFA. There are two critical points.

Point the first, and IMHO the most important, is the rest of the paragraph that makes the "60 to 75 minutes" statement: the people weren’t necessarily healthy, just alive.

In other words, the exercise was sufficient to reduce risks of mortality, but insufficient to actually improve health.

That's a damning condemnation of the effects of excessive sitting if ever I've read one: Sit too long and your health is pooched, even if you exercise enough to survive.

Point the second, the writer points out that exercise recommendations are a balance between what will bring the most benefit and what (most) people will actually do. Very few people will exercise 60 to 75 minutes a day...

...and I suspect that if they knew that that amount of exercise would have positive survival benefit but negligible health benefit they'd say to hell with it, and just keep sitting.

Hence explicit and implicit recommendations from the article: Exercise 150 minutes a week (more if you can), sit less (a lot less).

See my other comment re the quality of this "refutation". You're doing fine (better than most) at 4 hours a week.

Just sit less. Get up and move around more during the day. Consider both sitting and standing desks....

My issue with standing desks is that to me that would not nearly be enough. Physiologically there is quite a gap between standing and walking, the latter being a lot easier and also a lot more effectful. The whole story is much more complicated when looking at body and brain. We can say for sure we do way too much sitting, but standing is not even half the solution. Actual movement is required, for a lot of physiological functions as well as for the brain.

Anyone who learned to ride a horse should have learned that you letting a horse stand still for prolonged periods, specially with you on top, isn't so great for the horse, it can carry its weight (and you) much more easily when moving. I doubt that I'm different from the rest of humanity when I say that I can't (just) stand for nearly as much time as I can walk, standing is actually really hard (just for me? I don't think so).

I also noticed that even for productivity I need both sitting and walking, I have yet to discover a need for "standing". When I'm looking for inspiration and "to loosen up" after having worked for too long on one problem I start walking, and often find an easy way out of my problem within 15 minutes of walking. But when I need to be "in the zone" and know exactly what I want I need to sit. Walking won't do - too much distraction. Standing won't do - too hard.

I see a place for standing, but if I could do a perfect mix of sitting, standing and walking than standing would be the state I spend the least amount of time in. Maybe a little more with those crosses between sitting and standing, and a lot of changing posture. But in the end sitting and walking are my key states.

"Yes sitting at work is bad, but is standing actually better?":

  > “Standing all day isn’t the answer,” said Alan Hedge, a design and ergonomics
  > professor at Cornell University. “That’s where we were 100 years ago, and we
  > needed to develop chairs to prevent curvature of the spine, backaches, and
  > varicose veins.”

The article has a lot more detailed and varied information, as my long text already indicates, the problem isn't black/white and has plenty of nuance.

https://www.bostonglobe.com/lifestyle/health-wellness/2014/1...

I dream of the day that I can program while backpacking through the Appalachians.

Also, title should be fixed -- "Excerise" -> "Exercise".