If you&#;ve paid attention to, well, the world over the past half decade, you&#;re probably aware of the latest hype-train in workplace technology: standing desks. There&#;s a good chance that at least one person in your office is a &#;standing desk&#; advocate. And now, as we outfit our homes with the latest remote work tools, these contraptions have found their way to our bedrooms, living rooms, and makeshift home offices.
If you are looking for more details, kindly visit FreErgo.
The perfect companion to mindfulness and Soylent, standing desks became all the rage as a way to counteract the negative health impacts of sitting in a crouched position all day. While the hype has died down a little bit (in no small part due to a predictable counter-hype training accusing standing desks of causing knee problems), standing desks continue to grow in popularity and millions of people swear by them.
Is the hype justified? This article will dig into the facts and fiction behind standing desks, and try to answer a simple question: are standing desks worth it?
Standing desks are by no means a recent invention. In fact, many famous intellectuals, writers & statesmen worked on standing desks as a means to improve posture and drive focus &#; names like Thomas Jefferson, Ernest Hemingway and Charles Darwin among them.
The theory behind standing desks are sound: according to a meta-analysis of studies done on the topic, it&#;s clear that prolonged sitting consistently leads to much higher mortality rates. So, following that train of thought, standing should solve that problem. Right?
Well, the answer there is frustratingly fuzzy. Part of why it&#;s a difficult question to answer is because we aren&#;t entirely certain why sitting is so bad. We know it&#;s bad for your posture, and we know it causes issues with circulation. It&#;s also a strong signal for obesity (though that&#;s more of a lifestyle issue than directly related to sitting). So if posture and obesity are the two primary issues with sitting, are standing desks the answer?
In part because of a lack of studies on the issue, and in other part because the results simply aren&#;t convincing, there isn&#;t much evidence to make a strong case against sitting. In other words, we can&#;t convincingly say that standing desks are better for you.
Here&#;s what we do know. A study by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) showed that standing desks reduced upper back and neck pain and improved overall mood vs sitting down. While this sounds compelling, there are two obvious flaws to this conclusion: 1) there&#;s likely a placebo effect at least partially involved with the latter, and 2) the study didn&#;t look into possible drawbacks of standing desk.
On the topic of orthopedic health, standing is certainly a better option for your posture, as well as back and neck, than sitting. This aligns with the recommendations of orthopedic specialists, medical professionals with an MD degree who focus on the musculoskeletal system. However, standing for long periods of time also brings it&#;s own share of issues, primarily related to knee pain. When factoring in all the unique drawbacks of standing desk, research around this issue suggests that standing desks generally don&#;t offer more orthopedic benefits to sitting desks.
There are ways to counteract some of the drawbacks of standing desks. For example, fatigue mats have been shown in some studies to reduce standing fatigue and knee strain by as much as 60%. While there certainly isn&#;t any research to drive this conclusion, that difference might just be enough to tip a standing desk setup over the edge in comparing it to it&#;s 4-legged counterpart.
The other purported benefit of standing desks is supposed to be for obesity. On that front, there is a scientific consensus. A standing desk setup doesn&#;t burn significantly more calories than sitting down, and it certainly isn&#;t anywhere close to the miracle obesity cure it has often been hyped to be. At best you can expect to burn a few pounds a year, but week to week it won&#;t make much of a difference.
So, if we had to summarize, the actual physiological impacts of standing desks don&#;t have enough research behind them to say conclusively one way or the other, but the little research that does exist seems to strongly suggest that they aren&#;t all that helpful an alternative.
Short answer: It depends.
Long answer: Research doesn&#;t seem to suggest that a standing desk is helpful from a physical perspective, but that doesn&#;t mean it wont improve your overall work experience. Until there&#;s more research on the issue, the right answer likely depends on your personal preference and physical responses to standing while you work. And even if standing desks don&#;t significantly impact your physical health, there&#;s a good chance they could improve your overall mood or improve your productivity.
The issues with standing desks are independent from those with sitting desks. In other words, standing mitigates a lot of the problems that sitting has while introducing some of it&#;s own, and vice versa.
Following that train of thought, you could conclude that the best way to maximize the benefits of both while minimizing the risks is a hybrid setup. Sit-stand desks are an increasingly popular alternative to a pure sit or stand desk &#; desks that can be electronically shifted up or down to switch between sitting or standing.
In theory, this setup should enable the best of both worlds; minimizing the risks of either setup, while still attaining the benefits.
Sit-stand desks are still relatively new and not very well understood, but there is some research out there that suggests this line of thinking is valid. A study done by a team of researchers in the UK aimed to answer this question, studying the impacts of hundreds of office workers who switched to a sit-stand desk. The results were fairly convincing: participants showed notable improvements in job performance, work engagement, occupational fatigue, daily anxiety and quality of life.
Several Hive employees use standing desks, so we reached out to get their thoughts. When we asked 2 people if their standing desks were worth the purchase, both immediately responded yes. They were very eager to share their thoughts about the desks they use (and love) right now.
Jovanna, our head of People Ops, uses this Fully Standing Desk for kids. Although it&#;s on the pricey side, Jo says it has been worth the money. Her pro tip? Get the kids desk! The size still works for adults, but it&#;s small enough to fit in an apartment, which is great for remote workers.
CJ, Hive&#;s VP of Product & Engineering, also uses his standing desk &#; the Realspace Magellan Performance Desk &#; to be more productive while working from home right now. He says the desk gives him an excuse to get up for a few hours every day, which is something all remote workers will relate to. One unexpected benefit CJ mentioned? It&#;s a great space saver. The elevated height lets him tuck his chair under the desk, which keeps it out of the way in his apartment.
Standing desks are, without a doubt, over-hyped, and most of the supposed benefits simply aren&#;t true. While the science is still catching up, the existing research strongly points in the direction that standing desks simply aren&#;t worth the investment.
Sit-stand desks, however, do show some promise, which ultimately belies the underlying point: the real issue is structural, and not related to your desk. We need to move away from sedentary office life, and move towards encouraging workplace cultures that promote activity.
Regardless of your desk setup, there is one consistently proven technique for improving your health: walk. Replacing 2 minutes of sitting time every hour with a quick stroll around the office reduced risk in office workers of premature death by a whopping 33 percent.
Seriously &#; just by getting up to get a glass of water once an hour you&#;re 33% less likely to die prematurely compared to your peers. That&#;s a significantly bigger health impact (for significantly cheaper) than any reported benefits of standing desks.
Instead of focusing on a desk, the best workplaces have a steady mix of sitting, standing & walking &#; and ultimately, that&#;s the future of work we need to strive towards.
As someone who works at a computer more or less all day every day and has chronic back problems, a standing desk is an important part of my office setup. I&#;ve been using one for over ten years and back then it was something of a luxury. But lately I&#;ve been seeing motorized standing desks, not dissimilar in design to the one I bought all those years ago, popping up for shockingly low prices. Are these super-cheap desks worth your money?
I&#;ve used three different desks in the last decade of working from home and writing about technology &#; maybe four, depending on how you count all the various parts and components. And I reviewed another model for one of my previous employers, all from different suppliers, so I feel like I know what I&#;m talking about here. My latest one is something of a behemoth, to deal with my huge desktop and triple-monitor display. (Hey, I write for PCWorld, I come by it honestly.)
Between the heavy-duty, four-legged, quadruple-motor Uplift frame and the custom-made six-foot desktop I ordered from a Dallas carpenter, the whole package cost me over $1,500. And I&#;m sorry if that sounds like flexing, but I literally spend more time at this desk than in my bed some weeks. It&#;s worth making it a good one. For the sake of comparison, the previous desks I&#;ve used and then passed on to friends or family members when I upgraded were all $600 or more.
Looking to pick up a new monitor for your home office? Check out PCWorld&#;s roundup of the best monitors available today.
But you don&#;t have to spend four figures on a standing desk, even a &#;fancy&#; one with a motorized raising and lowering action. In fact, I bought (or rather expensed for this very article) a motorized standing desk off Amazon for precisely $100. (The same model is $200 at the time of writing, but it&#;s easy to find alternatives.) Shipping was free, tax an additional $6. It was only the latest entry I&#;d seen on SlickDeals for super-low-priced standing desks, which got me wondering if they were actually worth the price, or in any way comparable to the more premium desks to which I&#;m accustomed.
A hundred bucks is a pretty good price for a 55-inch bamboo desk all on its own. You might be able to find a particle board version of one at Walmart or Target, for example, to say nothing of a standing version. Or at least that&#;s what I assumed &#; in fact I found a nearly identical desk, only slightly smaller and lacking the keyboard tray, for precisely $100. Even less expensive ones are available if you look around.
Walmart
Walmart
Walmart
So, clearly there&#;s been something of a race to the bottom in this market, with a hoard of overseas suppliers making desks as cheaply and quickly as possible. I suspect a spike in demand during the pandemic has created a huge surplus of these desks. But &#;cheap&#; doesn&#;t automatically mean &#;bad,&#; as my hard-working Kia Soul can testify.
The question I aim to answer is whether or not you should save some money on your setup by going with one of these ultra-cheap motorized standing desks or if you&#;re better off saving up for a more deluxe option from a reliable supplier.
The INNOVAR (ALL CAPS) desk arrived from Amazon in a shocking one day, and as it happened to be Saturday, I set to assembling it immediately. I&#;m no stranger to flat-pack furniture in the Scandinavian style, and I&#;ve assembled and taken apart similar desks about a dozen times, so it only took me about 45 minutes to put everything together. While there are commonalities in all of these desk designs, I spotted a few important differences.
Opening the box and starting assembly. My personal standing desk is on the left.
Opening the box and starting assembly. My personal standing desk is on the left.
Michael Crider/Foundry
Opening the box and starting assembly. My personal standing desk is on the left.
Michael Crider/Foundry
Michael Crider/Foundry
The first thing I noticed was that it was shockingly light. At 46.2 pounds (just under 21 kilograms) in the box, I was able to move it into my office in one trip, even with my back problems. Frankly this didn&#;t bode well: If there&#;s one thing I like in a desk, it&#;s some heft, especially when the important bits are steel. Upon opening the box, my suspicions were confirmed.
While the bamboo top is pretty typical and appears to be fine, all of the steel parts are made from &#;&#; or 2mm panels. They&#;re all light enough to toss around&#;not that you should try it. For the sake of comparison, the frame of my old Fully Jarvis desk with a similar size weighed at least twice as much.
Unlike other standing desks, there&#;s no bracer frame under the desktop &#; it merely screws right into the wood.
Unlike other standing desks, there&#;s no bracer frame under the desktop &#; it merely screws right into the wood.
Michael Crider/IDG
Unlike other standing desks, there&#;s no bracer frame under the desktop &#; it merely screws right into the wood.
Michael Crider/IDG
Michael Crider/IDG
Speaking of steel, I immediately noticed that there&#;s no top frame to the Innovar. All three of the previous desks I&#;ve used, plus one review unit, had steel crossbars that are affixed to the bottom of the desktop. The top is laid upside down on the floor, then the legs are bolted in place. Not so here: the instructions had me assemble the legs first, complete with the motor and the T-bars, then screw the entire assembly onto the bottom of the desktop, along with the included keyboard tray and plastic accessory hooks.
Are you interested in learning more about 36 inch electric standing desk? Contact us today to secure an expert consultation!
The desk&#;s frame is made out of extremely thin sheets of steel.
The desk&#;s frame is made out of extremely thin sheets of steel.
Michael Crider/IDG
The desk&#;s frame is made out of extremely thin sheets of steel.
Michael Crider/IDG
Michael Crider/IDG
Being familiar with these desk designs, I did a double-take looking at the actual motor mechanism. It&#;s housed in a semi-exposed barrel on one side of the frame, whereas the other standing desks I&#;ve used had motors hidden inside the leg pillars. Note the plural there: this desk has just one rather weak motor driving both legs at once. It does this by means of a long hexagonal steel bolt, essentially a giant Allen wrench spanning between the two legs.
Michael Crider/Foundry
Michael Crider/Foundry
Michael Crider/Foundry
The fact that this driver bolt was exposed to the bottom of the desk threw me for a loop. Not only is it exposed, just begging to get caught on cables or wires, it&#;s positioned on the front side of its crossbeam, facing the user. The odds of actually rubbing against your knees are pretty low unless you moonlight as an NBA player, but as someone who often runs wires all across the underside of a desk to keep the top nice and clean, it makes me nervous to see moving parts anywhere in there.
The motor drives the left leg with a simple hexagonal bar &#; basically a giant Allen wrench. The motor drives the left leg with a simple hexagonal bar &#; basically a giant Allen wrench.Michael Crider/Foundry
The motor drives the left leg with a simple hexagonal bar &#; basically a giant Allen wrench.Michael Crider/Foundry
Michael Crider/Foundry
Also, having an exposed mechanism like this means that the legs aren&#;t automatically level out of the box. I had to manually adjust the initial height of one side of the frame to match the other. And to get them matched on a separate hexagonal bar that I had to install myself, I had a limited choice of approximately six positions to place the &#;master&#; leg at to match it to the other side. I think I was able to eyeball it reasonably well, but this is a problem I haven&#;t encountered on desks with mechanisms that are less threadbare.
The Innovar desk includes a matching bamboo keyboard tray, a surprising extra at this price.
The Innovar desk includes a matching bamboo keyboard tray, a surprising extra at this price.
Michael Crider/Foundry
The Innovar desk includes a matching bamboo keyboard tray, a surprising extra at this price.
Michael Crider/Foundry
Michael Crider/Foundry
There are a couple of extra points in this specific desk package worth highlighting. First, it comes with a slide-out keyboard tray, something you don&#;t often see at any price. I prefer to raise my monitors up with VESA arms rather than lower the keyboard and mouse area, but it all achieves the same effect, so having the option without spending any extra money is a point in its favor. The cheap plastic hooks, presumably for hanging bags or headsets, I could do without entirely. I wouldn&#;t trust any kind of heavy bag to it (certainly nothing with textbooks inside), and second I&#;d rather see some more useful cable routing, like a tray for a power strip at the rear of the desk.
There&#;s one point in this desk&#;s favor: it comes with a four-setting, programmable height controller, complete with an LED readout. That surprised me &#; it was a pricey little upgrade when I bought a Fully desk. I imagine that these desks have become so ubiquitous that like Bluetooth in the head unit of a budget car, it&#;s just standard now. It&#;s a nice little controller with the LED readout smartly hidden within the white plastic. It&#;s just a shame that the power connector pins were so bent when I assembled it that I had to manually straighten them out with a flathead screwdriver. Some more stringent QA would have caught that.
Michael Crider/Foundry
Michael Crider/Foundry
Michael Crider/Foundry
Bent pins were far from the only issue I found with the desk. While I was finishing the setup, I noticed that the front was seriously dipping down. This isn&#;t completely the fault of the desk, as there&#;s a bit of a bunched carpet pad near the wall in my office. But I never noticed it before because no other piece of furniture in my office was so light that it couldn&#;t press down level on this pad with its own weight. Thankfully there are plastic adjustment feet underneath the white steel legs, and I was able to juuuuuust about level the surface of the desk by putting the front ones at their maximum height.
The pins on the power connection for the desk controller were so bent that I had to jam a screwdriver in there to straighten them out.
The pins on the power connection for the desk controller were so bent that I had to jam a screwdriver in there to straighten them out.
Michael Crider/Foundry
The pins on the power connection for the desk controller were so bent that I had to jam a screwdriver in there to straighten them out.
Michael Crider/Foundry
Michael Crider/Foundry
Finally, with everything set up to my satisfaction, I tested the raising and lowering action. It works. It&#;s slow, especially at the start, but it works. You can program up to four positions simply by pressing and holding the corresponding buttons on the controller, and it measures height in increments of a tenth of an inch. In fact you can set the surface even more precisely, because the action of the motor is analog, even though it&#;s measured digitally.
I proceeded to set up a pretty basic workstation: small laptop, monitor, keyboard, mouse, and mousepad. A lightweight lamp, heavy coffee mug, and a little LEGO set for flavor rounded it out, plus the various cables needed for everything with admittedly sloppy management. I&#;ve used it for a few weeks, but right away I could tell that this desk would be lacking in sturdiness.
To be blunt, the frame is just so light that the thing wobbles like a Weeble at the slightest touch. Every standing desk is going to have a little bit of give at the top of its height, even my massive four-poster. But this one is so unstable that I can see it shake with every single keystroke on my laptop, even when I wasn&#;t using any external display or keyboard, and even in the seated position.
Michael Crider/Foundry
Michael Crider/Foundry
Michael Crider/Foundry
At a lower position the stability is alright, it doesn&#;t feel like I could flip it over accidentally. But at the standing position it wouldn&#;t take more than ten or fifteen pounds of pressure to get this thing to tip either forwards or backwards. I can imagine an incautious child, a big dog, or an especially clumsy internet writer achieving this all too easily.
In the past I&#;ve mounted a full desktop with three monitors, lamps, and various and sundry other computing equipment to a standing desk with only a little warping of the wooden top surface to worry about. The Fully Jarvis, for example, is rated to lift 350 pounds (if not happily). Innovar claims a 198-pound capacity on this thing, and while the motor might be rated to lift that amount of weight, I have zero faith in this desk&#;s ability to actually stand up under that load for any amount of time. Just my admittedly &#;husky&#; desktop and 34-inch center monitor would weigh more together than the entire desk.
Is a $100 standing desk worth it? The answer will depend on your needs and your means, of course. My fellow tech writers and I often get into discussions along the lines of &#;how much does a budget laptop cost?&#; Well, if all you have to spend on a laptop is $300, then a budget laptop for you is $300 and not a penny more. If you find yourself in a situation where you simply cannot spend any more than necessary on a desk and you need a standing desk for ergonomic or health reasons, then yeah, it&#;s worth it.
But if you&#;re in this situation and you&#;re planning to create a workstation with a desktop PC at the center, then even that qualifier doesn&#;t apply to you. I can&#;t speak for every single desk on the market, but this Innovar model I&#;ve tested is so shaky and top-heavy that it can&#;t safely hold a big, beefy desktop. Get a regular desk or table instead. For this standing design and those of similar ilk, limit it to a small form factor PC at the absolute most, more likely a laptop and a lamp. I wouldn&#;t expect to pass this desk down as heirloom furniture, either.
Michael Crider/Foundry
Michael Crider/Foundry
Michael Crider/Foundry
The phrase &#;you get what you pay for&#; comes to mind, trite as it might be. If you&#;re in a position to invest in a more substantial desk or if you can afford to wait until your budget is more roomy, then I suggest you do so, especially if you&#;re working from home or otherwise planning on spending a large amount of time with it.
If you are looking for more details, kindly visit 36 inch wide electric standing desk.