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Wellness | Work from Home

Deciding Which Desk Type Is Best for You

Sitting, standing, both? What studies say about the desk dilemma.

Karen DeGroot Carter
4 min readSep 21, 2020

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Overhead view of wooden desk with desktop with docked tablet and someone holding mouse and touching keyboard.
Photo by ConvertKit on Unsplash

InYour Office Chair Is Hurting You,” Ashley Abramson states right in her subhead that standing desks aren’t the way to go — even though office chairs may cause back issues and a sedentary lifestyle is considered bad for heart health. In her interview with research epidemiologist and former trauma surgeon Dr. Turner Oslow, Abramson provides interesting insights from Oslow, who has designed what he calls “active chairs,” into what causes chair-related back pain for so many of us who work at a desk all day. With regard to standing desks, Oslow does indeed say to forget them, citing issues that plague most workers who stand for extended periods of time while they work.

Just the Facts, Please

A current search into why standing desks are good or bad for you quickly leads to a potentially confusing mix of information. Many online publications and websites have run articles by authors who simply agree with the typical current view that standing is better than sitting all day, with only a few actually offering helpful information on the topic based on the findings of significant studies.

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Karen DeGroot Carter
Karen DeGroot Carter

Written by Karen DeGroot Carter

Bylines in Publishers Weekly, Literary Mama, others. One Sister’s Song (novel). Not Nearly Everything You Need to Know About Writing (ebook).

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