Humans are not designed to stand for 8 hours every day. It's about switching poses frequently.
Humans are not designed to sit in chairs.
But chairs were designed for humans to sit in. Wont anyone think of the chairs!?
Standing desk experiment and consequent knee injury
41–47 of 47 posts
Re: Standing desk experiment and consequent knee injury
#42Try standing on a wobble board[1] while using a standing desk. I don't know if it's any healthier, but it is more fun, feels more comfortable, and keeps you moving.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balance_board#Wobble_boards
Re: Standing desk experiment and consequent knee injury
#43Sharing my experience here. I have had a standing desk for over 6 months. I built it myself and cannot adjust the height, but I am actually really happy about that. I have a high stool I can sit on whenever I want. I don't know how much I stand and how much I sit, I just sit whenever I feel like it but stand for most of the time. I think that's the key. Not having fixed rule but listen to how you feel and always have the possibility to sit. The fact that I don't have to adjust my desk makes me more flexible, I can sit for just 10 seconds sometimes. My legs felt heavy during the first few weeks, but now I feel great and it gave me a lot of energy. The only drawback is that I have such thick skin on my heels now that I lost sensitivity there. But heel sensitivity was not a feature I was really holding on to...
Re: Standing desk experiment and consequent knee injury
#44This discussion topic, which never ends here on HN, of "the correct working position", is pretty silly when properly analogized to "the correct sex position". Everyone knows there's only one position that feels the best and it should be done the same way for your entire life regardless of temporary or permanent health level or other conditions and the world would be a better place if all diversity were forcibly stomp…
Not really. One is something that you (mostly?) do for fun, and for relatively short periods of time. The other is something that you do by necessity for the majority of the day nearly every day, which makes it easy to injure yourself in ways that won't be immediately apparent.
Re: Standing desk experiment and consequent knee injury
#45I'm pretty sure chairs were invented for a reason.
So were cigarettes (which were even touted as a healthy thing for a period of time, and later found to be harmful). The point being: lots of thing are invented for a reason - but is that reason valid? Does it lead to secondary effects that outweigh the benefits?
Are you really comparing chairs to cigarettes? I'm not really sure that supports your point.
Snark aside, it seems to me that sitting down a lot is perhaps a contributing part of a lifestyle that probably isn't very healthy (not getting much exercise, not seeing much sunlight, etc). But it seems far from conclusive that replacing sitting down with standing up is really much of a solution for many people.
Re: Standing desk experiment and consequent knee injury
#46Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think if we take the mid-point between your story and his, we're getting there. Everything in moderation. That means sitting is fine and standing is fine, just not too much excess of either. My wife, an ex-carer, knows a number of athletic people who have very serious problems in their 50s and 60s as they've worn their hips and spine out. Conversely she knows a number of people with diabetes and heart problems in t…
The problem is that modern life is not geared toward moderation. The way our economy is structured, most people have to spend their entire day working in order to make ends meet. And for a lot of people "work" means being tied to a computer for 8 or more hours. The human body is really not well suited to doing any one thing for longer than 8 hours at a time, but unfortunately our lifestyle almost requires it.
It most certainly doesn't require it. I think most people are just resigned to it.
Re: Standing desk experiment and consequent knee injury
#47Summary: a guy with an undiscovered previous injury aggravated it with a lifestyle change, and now it's on the front page of HN scaring people away from living a healthier (less-sitting) lifestyle. You have one unfortunate story, but I have the opposite positive story. As usual, it means that people are not all the same - and what works for one doesn't necessarily work for another. What's your bodyweight? Are you car…
My body weight is normal. I weight 73 kilograms and I am 178 centimeters high. Did heavy weight lifting for 2 years before the injury. No serious injuries prior to that. I was pretty confident I could take any type of physical exercises.
I did not make this post to scare people, but rather to inform them that everybody should give more time to diagnostics and see if they could perform some types of exercises/sports/whatever before they start.