“Excessive sitting is a lethal activity,” James Levine, a doctor of endocrinology at the Mayo Clinic, who has studied sedentary behaviour for nearly 20 years, told the New York Times in 2011. And the solution — at least the one people heard — was to start standing. Levine’s research had inspired a pile of viral stories cataloguing the negative effects of sitting at a desk: leg muscles shut down, blood pressure increases, cholesterol plummets, your reserves don’t get written. OK, I made up that last one, but the real takeaway was no less dire. People only heard “stand up”, and ignored the rest — a radical change in office furniture was the risk-averse response.
Over the next several years, workers embraced stand-up desks. Courts around New Zealand followed suit. Health and safety went into overdrive and we were told good science had spurred a small change to dramatically improve our health. As my resident courts of Papakura and Pukekohe are in the deep south of South Auckland, and at the end of the Ministry’s fiscal line, my keenly awaited “standyuppie” was only recently installed — such fun! I believed I was literally rising from the dead!
Or was I? The stand-up revolution was followed by another wave of stories reporting that being on your feet in the same place all day has its own downsides, including increased risk of cardiovascular problems. I took a tour around our Auckland buildings to assess our commitment to stand-up desks. Many had them but were not using them, many had simply not bothered to get them, and those with them appeared to just sit there as high as any extra tall chair would go, teetering, with fingers stretching out to reach keyboards. Oh, and as for courtrooms, forget it — no standing desks in the very place we sit most.
Sadly over the summer, my double-knee dislocation (a story for another day about not chasing a mob of cattle in jandals) has meant many hours of manipulation by our resident fitness coach, Malcolm Hood and his new wingman, Rebecca Mooney, a former New Zealand champion gymnast. Our talks over the therapy table included this dilemma. Malcolm let out the sigh of a man who’d heard all this before. “It’s not the furniture that makes the difference, it’s the behaviour,” he said. “The desk without the behaviour doesn’t help you.” Malcolm told us this in his piece about safe sitting.
I’m not like my ancestors who worked on a farm where motion was an all-day requirement. My job seems specifically designed to keep me wasting away in a chair. A phone and a computer allow me to communicate from my chambers and a courtroom where I sit in judgement without leaving a two-metre radius for hours on end is my daily confinement. I might exercise for an hour every weekday morning, but studies show that if I then go to work and sit at my desk without substantial movement then I’m doing nothing to achieve a Lazarus effect
We don’t have environments that send the right message. Designers of future courts take note — please include in your design brief to include secure open spaces and even a workout room for your judges.
Malcolm says the solution to sitting isn’t to stand, though it helps. In fact, according to the findings of a 2015 consensus panel on the topic, we need to be on our feet two to four hours while at work. But the real solution is to move. All day. The stillness is what’s killing us. We should be pacing the hallways and climbing stairs and squatting and stretching.
So at my desk, I now do inconspicuous yoga poses with names like seated eagle and hip opener. Here are Malcolm’s top five movements for you to sneakily put into that daily routine.
