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Comment by jrockway | Hacker News Reader

I use a standing desk for 100% of my workday, but I'm getting really tired of the "humans weren't meant to sit" line. Humans weren't really meant to do anything, we evolved over time to adapt to situations as they happened. We can stand, we can sit, we can run. The only problem is that specializing in one area for 8 hours a day means neglecting the other areas, and that's where the problems come in. The key is not to say "humans weren't meant to sit", but "humans lose muscle tone and flexibility if they only sit" or something more quantifiable.

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As far as I know, the evidence is very conflicted on whether using a standing desks is actually better than sitting. Apparently, standing still is still sedentary.

Standing still exercises the leg muscles. That, in turn, improves blood circulation.

Having said that, I think the 'sitting kills you' meme is mostly a fad. Yes, sitting perfectly still for hours isn't healthy, but if the way 'normal' office people sit were as unhealthy as the current fad implies, we would have seen that from life expectancies of white collar vs blue collar workers decades ago.

Also, there are different ways of sitting. For example, a couch potato is quite different from an Italian talking while sitting.

As to the evolutionary claims: most animals are incredibly lazy, with sprints in between. Looking at our close relatives, chimps and gorillas, I see days of sitting and lying with some strolling and an occasional run in between. Looking at wolfes, an animal similar to humans in the sense that is is specialized in long distance running, I read on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gray_wolf#Behaviour that gray wolves run about 25 km/day on average. At a modest 5 km/h, that leaves them 19 hours to, basically, do nothing.

Maybe, we should bring back the Roman way of lying down on a sofa at a table?

Standing is a fair bit more active. You legs and core muscles are engaged.

I am a naturally fidgety person, so at my standing desk I am constantly shifting my weight from foot to foot, and making other small movements. I am by no means running a marathon every day, but I'm definitely not sedentary either.

Standing raises my heart rate, which is about 50bpm sitting and 70 standing. In an 8 hour day, that's about 10,000 extra beats, which is about as many extra beats as riding my bike for 20 minutes. That translates to around 100 extra calories burned a day, just by doing nothing! (That's a pound a month, or so.)

I also spend about 8 hours a week on my bike, so 20 minutes is relatively insignificant, but I'll take free weight loss any day. The benefits on posture are not to be dismissed, either.

Is this really tiring?

I get tired standing in line or even just trying to sit with good posture in my office chair.

As a 22 year old, though, I expect I will need to make changes if I want to maintain my physical condition while spending all my time at a computer.

In basic training, the lines were grueling coming from a computer background. The motto is 'hurry up and wait', and most of that waiting is done in a uniform line. After a few weeks, I noticed I did not bend my knees or twitch around as much.

Five years later, I transferred to a standing desk after sitting in labs and office chairs for three years. After that three week point, once again, I noticed the uncomfortableness of it fade away. Standing desks nearly insta-improve posture if you setup your angles correctly.

The real problem with chairs: most people do not take the time to adjust the arms, height, angles, monitor angles, and keyboard/mouse position for correct posture. Usually, the adjustments are made for comfort. Temporary comfort does not equate to long term comfort. Our CIO suffers from extreme back problems in his older age.

It can be at first, but it just takes some conditioning. The more you do it, the more your muscles will adjust to it. An added benefit is that you likely be less tired standing in line too.

Check your arches, you might be standing with a wrong posture. I used to get tired really quickly if I stand for longer than 10 minutes and with the first steps in the morning [0]. A physiotherapist helped me fix it with exercises and stretching.

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plantar_fasciitis

Well, we're sure as shit not meant to sit in front of a screen all day.

I'll readily agree we're "not meant to".

However, I'm not sure how to be equally productive without sitting in front of a screen.

Nature has no intent, we aren't meant for anything.

It's a metaphor. We use lots of metaphors when talking about evolution. They're useful. We say features of organisms were designed and have purposes. It's all metaphor; nothing to get upset over.

It may be a metaphor, but it's also nothing more than a creation-anchor metaphor.

I happen to enjoy figurative language and I'm not going to give it up because other people because abuse it.

Should we throw out the word "theory" because creationists refuse to understand it?

No, it's not useful, it's exactly this kind of sloppy language that has so many people so confused about evolution to begin with. I'm not upset, so you mind your own feelings and don't worry about mine.

In that case we should probably go ahead and throw out the word "evolution" as well. After all, etymologically speaking it's a metaphor with strong teleological connotations. Worse yet, it also hints at predestination. All in all, I'd say it's much more troublesome than "meant to".

PROTIP: Rather than getting cranky about someone using a subtly different meaning for a word from the one you tend to prefer, instead just mentally substitute a word or phrase that falls within your linguistic comfort zones while still capturing the author's intended meaning.

For example, in this case just mentally substitute the phrase "well adapted for" for "meant to".

If you like writing so sloppily that others have to guess your intention, that's your style, it isn't mine; there's nothing wrong with pointing out incorrect usage of words.

You always have to guess their intention — natural human language is inherently imprecise. You simply choose to protest in this case rather than allowing your mind to find a reasonable meaning for their words as you would in most other cases.

For example, you use the word "speaking" here, but nobody is actually speaking. This presents us with the choice of guessing your intent or pitching a fit. (BTW, apparently incorrect usage of words is your style. It's OK — occasional lack of precision is actually the entire human race's style.)

Corrected. I didn't protest anything, I corrected, and it wasn't some random thing, his usage wasn't simply wrong, it was wrong in the way most people are confused about the theory and it needed corrected. One should never write about evolution as if it were intelligent. It's bad enough most of the people in this country don't believe in it, as if facts require belief.

> as if [it] was intelligent.

Should be "as if it /were/ intelligent." Neglecting the subjunctive mood isn't some random thing, and it isn't simply wrong, it's wrong in the way most people are confused about English grammar and it needs to be corrected.

blah blah blah.

meant for x = "narrowly optimal for x with a lot of dependencies on x"

I suppose nature didn't intend for giraffes to eat foliage high in trees, but it has benefited the giraffe to be able to do so.

There's evidence (1) that sitting 9-to-5 is harmful even if you exercise vigorously outside this period.

(1) http://www.natap.org/2010/newsUpdates/SittingTimeCauses.pdf

This one looks like they at least asked about sitting specifically, which is better than most ("watching television" is a standard survey question, so often it is just assumed that "watching television" == sitting and look for correlations from there). There are a few limited studies that do direct experimental manipulation of sitting without breaks vs. sitting occasionally interrupted and suggest that further study might be useful. I would be surprised (but maybe not too suprised) if there weren't more detailed longer term studies in progress involving hardware monitoring devices and other clever setups that could make more detailed correlations that could be useful.

So far, studies are just saying "here is some evidence that activity level does not have an extremely simplistic correlation with health." Puting it like that, it doesn't seem that surprising (or useful).

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