Don’t Just Sit There

Tags: Business, General,

If you're sitting in your office chair reading this, you're not long for this world. Not to mention your chair. The experts have weighed in and either the chair has to go or you will. When and how is still to be determined. But trust me, it’s just a matter of time.

When I first started working in an office, I was warned about getting “secretary’s spread.” There really is no dignified way to describe it but here goes:

A widening of the posterior and hips due to infrequent activity, caused by sitting down for a long period of time.

Technically, I was immune to it because I couldn’t really type. Even still, I was always checking for early signs of “pseudo-secretary’s spread.”

Curiously, the men we worked for never seemed to get the dreaded deformity, even though they seemed to sit around as much as we did (maybe all those golf outings made the difference…?).

But once Casual Friday’s came around and the guys traded their fitted suits for chinos and golf shirts, we discovered (to our dismay) that “secretary’s spread” was an equal-opportunity offender.

Back in the 90s, I met a retired airline CEO who still worked from his custom built standing desk. He never sat down during the day except for meetings. Coincidentally, he had the slim, wiry build of a man half his age.

Fast forward to the early part of this century: I was walking through the bullpen of a hotel client in New York when I noticed one of the managers sitting on a big blue rolling ball while typing on her computer.

Fortunately she was too busy concentrating on keeping her balance to notice the rest of us rolling our eyes and snickering behind her back. But now that I think of it, she, too, had a very lean, fit physique.

Decades later, everybody (but secretaries) is sitting in front of computers for hours-on-end — day and night — for work, play and TV series binging.

It’s getting ugly out there in more ways than one and the health and fitness risks are now affecting children as well as working adults.

In a recent New York Times Sunday Review piece, author Pamela Paul minced no words when she warned that “sitting has gone from something responsible and orderly to something borderline unseemly. Sitting makes you slump, sitting makes you fat, sitting makes you lazy.”

She cited “urgent studies” from the American Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to proclaim sitting “nothing short of deadly.”

And this just in: Researchers at the American Cancer Society are now saying that women who sit for six hours or more each day have a 10 percent greater risk of getting invasive breast cancer than women who stay seated for three hours or less.

Too late.

Or is it?

Now that we know what we (wish we didn’t) know, maybe we can try to turn the tide a bit by starting to check out the endless variety of stand up desks, treadmill desks and sit-to-stand computer carts that are out there.

Cheaper still, we could all trade our rolling desk chairs for a colorful stability ball (like the one I Iaughed at) or a chair with a swinging footrest.

I agree it all sounds a bit frenetic — especially if you work in an open space — being surrounded by all those buff, hyperactive co-workers (lecturing you on why you shouldn’t be sitting).

I’ll let you sort it all out for yourselves with some advice from the late English singer, Amy Winehouse:

“Life's short. Anything could happen, and it usually does, so there is no point in sitting around thinking about all the ifs, ands and buts.”

Especially the buts…

Anita Alvare (bio)/Alvare Associates/610-520-6140