Standing Desk Vs. Exercise Ball (At Your Desk)
Sitting in a chair all day can take a severe toll on your body, it can cause obesity, cardiovascular disease, and even colon cancer. Sitting for too long can affect your posture, your gait, and also cause depression.
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But wait, while you are still seated and before you rush over to amazon and impulse purchase a standing desk, let’s discuss if it’s worth it and if it’s the right decision for you. There are many products out there to decrease the adverse effects of sitting, but the most common besides the standing desk is exchanging your chair for an exercise ball.
So let’s pin these two giants of workplace wellness against each other and see which one comes out on top.
We’ll use the three most common reasons to transition from regular old sitting to rank our favorite:
Pain relief
Weight loss or burn calories
Get stronger
PAIN RELIEF
Pain Relief is the number one reason people decide to move from a chair to something better. The pain associated with sitting at a desk all day is caused by the posture you work in, and the duration you maintain it.
Neither a standing desk nor an exercise ball will completely solve this problem because you won’t have the strength or endurance to transition from sitting to either solution for an entire workday. Both sitting on an exercise ball and standing at a desk for hours is difficult, yet beneficial, but which would relieve more pain overall?
Standing Desk - Pain Relief
Standing desks are great for relieving the pain caused by sitting because you are transitioning to a new position. When you sit, your legs are not apart of the equation, your lower back and abs are holding all of your weight. Since your legs contain the strongest muscles in your body, standing is an excellent way to get them involved. Also, standing is a great way to decrease neck and upper back tightness, bringing a monitor up to your standing height allows you to more easily maintain good posture than when sitting.
Although standing isn’t all good news, standing is hard, and if you stay in one position all day, you’ll have a host of different pains than sitting all day. Standing still can bother your hips, your feet, and your back. If you are going to stand all day, I recommend a soft mat or fun terrain mat for your feet and wearing footwear that won’t bother you: ideally flat shoes, or supported gym shoes. Standing in dress shoes or anything with a heel is going to do more bad than good.
To protect your lower back while standing, you’ll need to change position regularly, stagger your stance, widen your stance, slightly bend your knees, and of course, sometimes sit back down. Whatever desk you purchase, it is nice to have one that can transition smoothly back to seated height. Remember that sitting isn’t truly the problem we are trying to solve with the standing desk, the real problem is staying in the same position for an extended period of time.
Exercise Ball - Pain Relief
An exercise ball relieves pain in a different way than a standing desk. While a standing desk has you adopt an entirely new position, an exercise ball forces you to sit better and engage the proper muscles. The exercise ball forces your abs to flex, and the cushy unstable seat allows your legs to be engaged as well, which can help take more of the stress off our lower backs. The exercise ball also makes it easy to perform little exercises that stop us from sitting still all day. While sitting on a ball, you can rock back and forth by tucking your pelvis under you and flexing your glutes and then returning to the normal seated position. This subtle movement can help you stay pain-free on the exercise ball for far longer than by simply sitting.
The most important thing when choosing an exercise ball is getting the appropriate size for your height. If you are going to use it as a chair, we need to make sure it will keep you in the proper posture. Often the seller will provide you this information, but an easy test is to sit on the ball and aim to have your knees at around 90-degree angles. Once you’ve got your properly fitted ball, please don’t get rid of your chair. You aren’t going to be able to sit correctly on an exercise ball for eight hours, it may not feel like it at first but sitting on a ball is hard work, and if you don’t engage your abs, you will quickly adopt poor posture while sitting on your new posture fixing ball. Start with twenty-minute intervals throughout the day, and build on that as you get stronger.
Pain Relief Winner: The Standing Desk
While both will help relieve pain over time, the standing desk will offer more immediate relief. Letting your legs carry the load will help but remember not to stand still all day, or you’ll have to deal with new pains. It is a good idea to find a desk that can easily transition from standing back to sitting.
**Both a standing desk and an exercise ball are preventive measures if you are already in pain and looking for corrective exercises, here are a few that may help**
WEIGHT LOSS
The first thing to understand about weight loss is that it is a math equation. If. If you burn more calories than you eat, you’ll lose weight. If not, you won’t. Therefore, the only metric we will use for this section is what burns more calories.
Standing Desk - Weight Loss
When it comes to weight loss and a standing desk, there is a lot of propaganda out there about how many more calories you’ll burn when compared with sitting. However, the reality is standing still, and sitting isn’t that different; according to the Journal of Physical Activity and Health, you’ll only burn an average of 8 more calories per hour.
Exercise Ball - Weight Loss
It turns out that when it comes to burning calories, there is no difference between sitting on a therapy ball and standing–if you choose either activity you’ll burn about 6% more than would have sitting in a chair. A study titled, Increasing passive energy expenditure during clerical work, did, however, find that people enjoyed sitting on a therapy ball more than standing.
Weight Loss Winner: Exercise Ball
You’ll burn the same amount of calories, either way, around 6% more than you would normally. More people seem to enjoy the exercise ball and that is why it wins this category.
If weight loss is the goal, focus on your diet at your desk.
GETTING STRONGER
I want to make one thing clear; attempting to get stronger while at work will not replace exercise. It is beneficial to try and improve your posture and strengthen your core passively at work, although it won’t cut it for muscle growth. Even if you stand or sit on an exercise ball all day long, you’d still burn more calories and see more strength benefits from a twenty-minute jog. That being said, both a standing desk and an exercise ball offer ways to moderately improve muscular strength at work.
Standing Desk - Getting Stronger
Standing for extended periods can strengthen your glutes if you engage them and your feet. You can make the standing desk more of a challenge for your core by balancing on one foot or working your calves by doing calf raises. A standing desk won’t help you achieve the physique of a bodybuilder, but these little exercises make a difference over time.
Exercise Ball - Getting Stronger
An exercise ball can be used for over 100 exercises, most of which you’d never consider doing in front of your coworkers in an office setting. If you can get your coworkers to buy-in though, suddenly exercise ball breaks don’t seem so silly. The plank challenge is a common office competition, and one of the best ways to level up a plank is to perform it on an exercise ball. It just takes one other person in your office to start a trend.
Get Stronger Winner: Exercise Ball
You can’t beat the versatility of an exercise ball. You can use it to work almost every muscle in your body, and it would take a lot of creativity to attempt the same with a standing desk.
OVERALL WINNER:
EXERCISE BALL
An exercise ball is better for getting stronger and slightly better for weight loss. It also comes at a much more reasonable price point. Your average exercise ball is less than $20, and your standing desk is at least a couple hundred.
If you have the means, I’d recommend getting both, but no matter what you go with, you’ll still want a chair initially, it will take a few weeks to transition to only sitting on an exercise ball and standing. Whatever you decide, it will be a massive improvement over sitting at a regular old chair for 8-10 hours a day.
Recommended Chair Alternatives:
Keep your exercise ball simple; no need to break the bank; they don’t last forever anyway. This is is the best one I’ve found for the price.
I have a Jarvis standing desk, with the electronic height adjuster. I didn’t spring for the electric motor with the preset options, and I regret it. Although I can find my preferred heights quickly without it, after two years of holding down the button, I regret not spending the extra couple bucks.
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