Standing Desks

Will a standing desk make you healthier? Maybe.

Correct height is important. It also has a keyboard tray mounted under the surface, for when I'm sitting on a stool.
Partially-completed desk.. Read on to find out why I designed it for use with a bar stool, instead of for standing… and why I only stand for brief periods nowadays.

Over the years, I’ve had too much experience standing at work. In college, I didn’t call it a “standing desk”, though.  At the 7-11 I called it “the cash register”, and at the furniture factory it was”the shaper machine”. At the photo lab after graduation, where I made prints for commercial photographers, I called it “the enlarging table”. At the newspaper it was “the light table”, and for many years (first cameras, then computers,) a “repair bench”.

Ouch. Yes, these hurt.
Not shown: dicey knees and a hardly-helpful hip.

So I’ve stood on these legs at work for decades, but still had plenty of health problems. Most were due to manufacturer defect, but the varicose veins in the picture at right most likely resulted directly from standing.

This photo is Black & White for a reason; even I don’t like looking at them. Not only are they unsightly, but they hurt.

I have a hunch that  some people who stand for a living are prone to a sort of “collapse syndrome” when they retire. They’ll just sit, and sit, until it kills them. Unless they don’t, because other people really start exercising late in life.

Standing desks are probably, in some ways, better than sitting ones. But everything I’ve read says that moving is better than not moving. Should you get a treadmill desk, then? I just don’t know. Will your keyboard and and mouse and monitor move around too? The solution to working with non-moving glowing rectangles, while maintaining the health of a body that spent a million years evolving to move, probably hasn’t been solved yet.