The Bottom Line: Do Sit-Stand Workstations Improve Cardiovascular Health?

More and more companies have implemented sit-stand workstations to improve employee health. Researchers from the University of California conducted a study to prove this claim. The findings are summarized by VelocityEHS certified ergonomist Blake in this month’s Bottom Line video.

References: Rempel, D & Krause, N. (2018) Do Sit–Stand Workstations Improve Cardiovascular Health? Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine: July 2018 – Volume 60 – Issue 7 – p e319–e320

Video Transcript

Hi, my name is Blake McGowan, and I’m a certified professional ergonomist with Humantech (now VelocityEHS Ergonomics).

Sit-stand workstations have been around for many years but recently they have become more popular, as well as available, in the workplace. Some of the perceived benefits of sit-stand workstations, which allow the user to stand more and sit less in the workplace, include improved cardiovascular health. Well, is that true?

In 2018, researchers from the University of California, including David Rempel, conducted a systematic review of the literature of high-quality studies and summarized the impact of sit-stand workstations on cardiovascular health. So, what did they find?

Well, the primary findings include first that an increase in overall sitting time, which includes both occupational as well as leisure sitting time, has a negative impact on cardiovascular health. For those people who sit for more than 10 to 12 hours per day, there is a shown 50% increase in cardiovascular disease.

Well, this information leads us to believe that maybe standing more at work would be beneficial. Well, the second finding of their research is that an increase in occupational sitting time has absolutely no impact on cardiovascular health, meaning that standing more at work using a sit-stand workstation has no benefit to cardiovascular health.

So, what does this mean? What’s the bottom line?

The bottom line is there’s no evidence that a sit-stand workstation that promotes more standing and less sitting actually improves cardiovascular health.

The main benefits of sit-stand workstations are adjustability, accommodating the full range of the population, promoting movement, as well as improving comfort at work.

So, for more information on Humantech and the Bottom-Line series, please feel free to visit our website at Humantech (www.ehs.com).

Thanks, and have a great day.