Swap your office chair for a treadmill or an exercise bike? According to a new study, these workstations favoring physical exercise are not only ideal for our health: they also boost our productivity.
Will a sedentary lifestyle end up ruining our health? In any case, this is the damning finding issued by the World Health Organization (WHO). In a recent report, the WHO points to the harmful effects of our sedentary lifestyles, which it accuses of being the cause of 3.2 million deaths each year worldwide.
Among the places where we inevitably find ourselves sitting for a good part of the day are our workplaces. Faced with the threat to the health of workers around the world, researchers have in recent years focused on concrete solutions to extricate us from our office seat. Among the avenues considered, there are in particular standing workstations, but also, more innovative, those allowing you to walk, run or ride a bike while typing on your computer or leading a meeting.
And it is these “active” versions of the office chair that would be preferred, according to a new study published online in Occupational & Environmental Medicine. According to its authors, bike and treadmill workstations are “healthier” alternatives to simply standing workstations because “their use appears to be associated with greater positive physiological changes in the body.”
Benefits for health and productivity
To measure the health impact of these alternatives to the office chair and productivity, the researchers searched through databases comparing at least two standing, cycling and treadmill workstations. Twelve studies were finally selected, with results relating to the effects on muscles and physiology (average heart rate, blood pressure, pain tolerance, cognitive performance, etc.), processing speeds, attention, short-term memory term.
After analyzing the data, the researchers found that all types of workstations were associated with an increase in short-term productivity. However, the running and cycling positions additionally appeared to be associated with greater short-term physiological changes than the standing versions. “It might be better for long-term health,” the study authors suggest.
This is because treadmill workstations engage more upper body muscle activity compared to standing versions. Like cycling workstations, they increase heart rate and energy expenditure, while causing a drop in blood pressure during the workday, compared to standing workstations.
Another advantage of these sports workstations: they increase alertness, reduce boredom and are associated with lower stress scores. The researchers, however, issue a caveat about treadmill workstations: the shock with each stride can interfere with fine motor skills and hinder certain daily tasks such as pointing the mouse and typing on the keyboard. Not necessarily ideal, therefore, when working on a computer. However, this should not prevent employers from taking an interest in these new ways of working and determining which workstation best suits the needs of their staff.
The dangers of a sedentary lifestyle
The researchers cautioned, however, about the strength of the available data: only 11 of the studies they included directly compared different types of workstations. Outcomes measured only looked at short-term effects and the most comprehensive studies were relatively small in size. “Ultimately, workers and companies should be able to critically examine the pros and cons of each type of workstation and determine which is best suited to the specific tasks and needs of the worker” , they conclude.
Today, a sedentary worker who sits eight hours a day and does no physical activity has a 15% additional risk of dying prematurely. A person who sits for 11 hours a day is 40% more likely to die prematurely than someone who sits less than 4 hours a day. Furthermore, a study by Harvard University published in February 2014 proved that the longer we sit at work, in the car or in front of the television, the more likely we are to develop heart disease, cancer or stroke.
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