Standing desk experiment and consequent knee injury
nazargargol.comSummary: 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 carrying a bit more weight than is ideal? Did you have any previous injuries with your legs/knees? (Yes, we know that now.)
I suspect that you weren't snowboarding for a fraction as many hours as you were standing, so it's not really surprising that one activity hurt and one didn't.
I spent four years standing 10-16 hours a day - or rather, standing/shuffling/dancing. Not only did I not develop problems, but my lower back pains (from sitting) went away. And for the last few years I've been standing at work and doing pretty heavy weight lifting. I still feel great, and I'm in my 40s. I hope my story does as much to encourage people as yours does to discourage them.
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 the same age range.
The interesting thing I did find out is that those who do not focus on any particular fitness goal, eat what they need and don't objectively go out and exercise are perfectly healthy and run rings around the other groups.
A word of caution: all of these people were quite happy with their physical state into their 40s. The same with drug use, particularly hash etc which really kills you when you get to your late 30s and early 40s.
A standing desk has little to do with any of the above. Moderation of all things does.
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.
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.
This 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 stomped out and the one true position was legally required for all. Because there can only be one correct answer. You know, just like programming editors. See? Now everyone is happy.
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.
In my experience, typing while standing is really good, but watching Youtube videos (most of what programmer does) felt stupid/tiring.
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!?
Our fatty asses beg to differ.
Which came first, the chair or the fatty ass?
does it matter?
There's a right way and a wrong way to go about something like this. You can't design a good setup before you even know how standing most of the day feels for you. Get a good adjustable stand, don't skimp on "accessories" like gel mats, ease into it, and above all listen to your body. If you're uncomfortable, sit for a while. If you're sitting too much, try standing differently next time - e.g. monitor/keyboard higher or lower, feet closer or further apart, shifting weight. Your ideal standing position/habit for work might not be the one you've been using in other contexts. Maybe standing for long periods, in a body shaped by long years of not standing longer than absolutely necessary, just isn't for you. I hope more people realize the benefits of standing more and sitting less, but even more than that I hope nobody hurts themselves trying.
Standing in one place all day is the whole reason I never tried standing desks. It's painful as hell to stand all day. A treadmill desk might not be as bad, but my knees are generally unhappy whenever they absorb any kind of impact force. And sitting up/laying back isn't great because it basically atrophies your muscles from not being used at all for 8 hours a day.
It doesn't make much sense for us to work a set number of hours, anyway, since most tech jobs aren't repetitive labor, they're projects which can take anywhere between 15 minutes and two months. I'd rather just work less hours, have a more dynamic schedule, or just take an hour or two in the middle of the day to go climb a tree.
My father-in-law works (and stands) on street market for past 40 years. He is in similar shape as other man in his age. So I think there is no miracle here, just some physical work and exercise.
I'll bet your father-in-law moves about a fair bit on his stall assuming the market has barrows or stalls. I think the issue might be simply not moving much in whatever stance.
I'm a teacher and in term time in classes (6h a day usually) I'm not sitting much at all, but then I'm not standing in one place much either. No issues as yet...
Try 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
Sharing 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...
It seems that I am not the only one gotten hurt by standing all day long.
In my case, the knees are fine, the joint between my right thigh and body got hurt baddly.
So, do not stand a lot, do not sit all day long either.
Do drink water regularly, (kidney stones for sitting programmers) too much water will cause kidney problems too.
Maybe lying on a couch is the safest choice then. :-)
That's why I've been waiting forever for a certain one-handed chorded keyboard called Twiddler. :) (I'm not affiliated with them).
Everyone has some difference in leg length. Perhaps your leg length difference is great enough that it's putting too much lateral stress on your pelvis/hips.
More likely that he putting more pressure on one than the other without realizing it. We have lots on unconscious habits we are unaware of.
> At this point I decided it was a bad idea to stand all the time and switched to 2 week standing/sitting cycles.
Well there's your problem. You should alternate every couple hours, not every couple weeks.
Buy a tall stool or drafting chair so you don't need to move your desk up and down.
I've tried standing desks a few times and what I've found is that if your going to work more than regular hours it's a bad idea. That is you should not stand more than 8 hours a day for 5 days a week. And even then that should be punctuated by breaks such as lunch, meetings, etc.
The main difference I found say compared toa cashier is that you barely move. You don't twist side to side and so on. This might seem small but it's important.
The biggest issue though is that if you're doing a startup with long hours you need to be very careful. Like everything else overdoing anything is bad.
The recommendation I've seen from others before building my standing desk, and certainly the pattern I follow, is to alternative sitting and standing. My desk is set up for a standing situation, but I can undock my laptop and sit at any time. Some days I stand 65% of the time, some days I stand 10% of the time.
Mix it up, feel better.
I've been downvoted for writing this before, but here goes: exercise for exercise's sake may not be all it is cracked up to be. For example, standing for long periods is associated with an increased risk of varicose veins.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1740939/
I know many people believe all their physical ailments are traced to a sedentary lifestyle, but i don't think prolonged periods of abusing your body is the answer.
I don't think you can cite one study concerning an increased risk of varicose veins and conclude that exercise is not all it's cracked up to be.
That study seems pretty legit, but it only concerns one health problem, and a relatively minor one at that. Fewer than 2% of the people in the study even required hospitalization for their problem. Comparing that to the numerous benefits of exercise for things like diabetes and heart disease, I think exercise is still a worthwhile use of time.
Obviously "abusing" your body will result in bad things happening. But I don't think it's reasonable to suggest that standing too much is abuse. Sure you're trading one set of effects for another, but I would argue that the negatives of standing are far fewer than the negatives of sitting.
By your implication, walking would be abuse because it raises your heart rate - and we only have so many beats before it stops working!
Good workouts at the gym intentionally stress your body, and your body responds by repairing itself stronger.
Back to the sitting/standing discussion... it seems the downsides of sitting far outweigh the downsides of standing.
Standing is hardly exercise.
It's not as easy as sitting down though. Being on your feet for hours on end is definitely a skill that needs to be learned (in the military, for example).
OK, on that I agree. I bet this is not a skill the OP acquired.
One suggestion which I got from here on HN is to have some sort of small stool or object on which to rest one foot at a time while standing. It's much more comfortable than keeping equal weight on both feet and the reason why there's a brass rail on the floor in bars.
I use my desk in sitting mode most of the time. Of course, I've been breaking up my working day with a 45 minute run in the middle, but it's still great to have the option sometimes to stand.
I hope that your knee heals.
I'm gently curious about the people trying standing desks: this article mentions research on the dangers of sitting, but it doesn't mention any research on standing. Since many people are expected to stand all day at work I'd have thought there would be some research about standing.
Have people looked at that? How about investigating some of the products meant to counteract problems caused by standing all day (such as anti-fatigue matting).
Standing whole day is also not a good thing, that is why I was switching between the two all the time. Standing position is giving to much stress on the keens and develops things like atherosclerosis, hip arthritis, varicose veins...
I'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.
I bought my standing desk this spring. I started out using it almost all the time, but I was having similar problems after a long time standing.
Now, I use it in sitting mode most of the time, but use it in standing mode for conference calls. That works out to a nice balance during the day. It’s one button press and 15 seconds or so to adjust from sitting to standing and back, so it’s easy to switch.
I enjoy my sitting time and make up for it with a regular exercise regimen and lots of after work activities. At one big corp. I have been at, it was like a competition to see who could stand the longest and who appeared the most health conscious.
Has anyone looked into some sort of walking desk? Over a treadmill? It seems like that would alleviate the problems with standing.
Like the one that Linus Torvalds use? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HSgUPqygAww