Standing desks fail to lower blood pressure or minimize heart risks—they may even do damage
Standing desks gained popularity in recent years, especially once the COVID-19 pandemic had more and more people working from home, but they may not necessarily make that much of a difference.
According to one recent study in Circulation, for instance, getting more than 250 desk workers with hypertension to stand for a few extra hours per day was not associated with any sort of reduction in blood pressure.[1] Researchers even gave the workers wearable monitors to help ensure they stayed fairly active.
“People decreased their sedentary behavior by over an hour a day by standing at their desks and that was really good because there’s still a lot of evidence that suggests too much sitting is not good for us and we need to be moving more,” lead author Bethany Barone Gibbs, PhD, professor and chair of the department of epidemiology and biostatistics at the West Virginia University School of Public Health, said in a statement. “However, blood pressure didn’t improve at all, not with resting blood pressure, ambulatory blood pressure or pulse wave velocity. That’s important because I think a lot of people are using sit-stand desks and think that might help their blood pressure.”
Some participants who experimented with a standing desk even experienced increases in central arterial stiffness. While this result was unexpected, Barone Gibbs said it made sense from a clinical perspective.
“The veins in our legs have a one-way valve that, once the blood gets pushed up, it can’t come back down,” she explained. “That helps your heart pump the blood back up from your legs to your heart and brain. Whenever you flex the muscles in your calves by walking or moving, those muscle contractions are helping to push the blood up through this one-way valve. So, if you're standing at your desk, not moving, that probably results in the same blood pooling effects we see with sitting, but even worse because it’s even harder for your blood to push back up to your brain in a standing posture.”
Standing more outside of work did not increase arterial stiffness, she added, a sign that people stand quite differently—less rigid, for example—when they are off the clock.
“More active standing is happening when you’re on your own time,” she said. “Say I’m standing watching my daughter’s soccer game, I might be standing, but I am probably moving around talking to people and watching the game. I’m not just standing still for a long time. I am using my leg muscles and promoting blood flow. That’s an important distinction to make.”
Another recent analysis, this one published in the International Journal of Epidemiology, investigated how long work days without much activity can impact a person’s cardiovascular health. The study’s authors confirmed that sitting for more than 10 hours per day is associated with a greater risk of cardiovascular disease (CVD). However, they also found that using a standing desk or simply standing up for extended periods of time did not necessarily reverse that risk.
In fact, the group determined that standing for long periods of time may be bad for a person’s circulation, similar to the findings of Barone Gibbs et al.
“The key takeaway is that standing for too long will not offset an otherwise sedentary lifestyle and could be risky for some people in terms of circulatory health,” lead author Matthew Ahmadi, a research fellow with the University of Sydney in Australia, said in a statement. “We found that standing more does not improve cardiovascular health over the long term and increases the risk of circulatory issues.”
Ahmadi et al. did emphasize that excessive sitting is still bad for the heart. Desk workers should find ways to stay active to keep their CVD risk to a minimum—it is just important to remember that simply standing still at a desk is not enough to make a positive impact.
Michael has more than 18 years of experience as a professional writer and editor. He has written at length about cardiology, radiology, artificial intelligence and other key healthcare topics.