It’s funny how one study can make headline news while countless others collect digital dust in academic archives. Case in point: "Standing desks are bad for your health" or "Standing desks do not reduce risk of stroke and heart failure"—based on one study albeit with 83,000 participants. Let’s delve deeper, shall we? Before you toss out your standing desks, consider what this study actually reveals about how sitting and standing impact your health. The study aimed to examine daily sitting, standing, and stationary time in relation to cardiovascular diseases like coronary heart disease, heart failure, and stroke. It also looked at orthostatic circulatory diseases such as hypotension, varicose veins, and venous ulcers. Key findings? The first graph (fig.1) shows that standing for just 2 hours increases the risk of orthostatic circulatory disease (think vein issues), while sitting only increases this risk after 10 hours. Seems clear that lack of blood flow while sta...
As a massage therapist and a Pilates instructor in the city, I would see some clients with the same pain every time I saw them. And it wasn't that I wasn't a good therapist. They would see lots of experts, and it didn't matter which treatments they had, they reported the same pain. With other clients, their pain relief was more simple. They would regularly attend Pilates, do more exercise which could just be walking, change their desk set up and do more activities, which relaxed them. I used to think the more new techniques I could learn, the more I would be able to help those clients with more persistent pain. But I think less about my own techniques now, and more about the state of mind of the clients in persistent pain. Quite a few years ago, I remember one of my colleagues was in so much pain she actually couldn't sit down at her desk. She was relatively young, she hadn't had a fall or a fracture, she hadn't pulled a muscle or torn a disc ligament...