Before and After

My chair at work has been killing me. I'll get up after sitting at my desk for an hour and barely be able to stand up straight. I go to yoga class and my teachers tell me... "gee. you hold a lot of tension in your neck and shoulders." and I reply, "yeah, who doesnt?" To which they just kinda look at me with a sympathetic look and say... "maybe you should start getting some regular bodywork done to get rid of these knots." Ugh.

And, for while I was thinking... well.. hell... I have to work... and new fancy chairs are expensive.. I'll just make due.

But, the time has come for a change, my friends...

This was my arch nemesis desk and chair at approximately 11:30 yesterday morning:

And by about noon yesterday, I was working at this station (which you can see in the top left hand corner of the before picture).

The after:

Meet my new stand-up work station!!!

Trust me, after I saw the horror of that cluttered cubby hole in a picture, I spent the next 20 minutes moving that crap to other locations in the office.

I got the idea after talking to a friend about Stand Up desks, and he gave me some good online sources to check out about it and then I realized... duh... I've got this counterspace area that is probably the perfect height for me to give it a test run... so, I vowed that after tax season I would give it a try.

So far, I love it!!! (the light situation isnt great, so I gotta fix that and in the move I jacked up my double screen capability, so I gotta get that working again). But, I am anticipating some growing pains... particularly in my feet for the first week or so, while I get used to it. But, I feel like if I can make it through the first week of sore feet, that I'll end up loving this situation. I do have a stool that I can sit on occasionally for a break, and I've also leaned against the wall some when I need a little break for my feet.

Things I've already noticed in the half day that I've spent at my stand up work station:

--Surprisingly, I have a lot more room on this counter, than I had on my desk.

--And I feel like I'm more productive.

--Also, I find that I dance around a little when a song I like comes on Pandora. And... dude, dancing while doing taxes or cutting payroll checks = FUN!

Now, the main reason I did this was for my body. I hated feeling like an 80 year old woman everytime I got up from my desk... but, doing some research there's a lot of people advocating the stand-up work stations...

From the New York Times:

Indeed, if you consider only healthy people who exercise regularly, those who sit the most during the rest of the day have larger waists* and worse profiles of blood pressure** and blood sugar than those who sit less. Among people who sit in front of the television for more than three hours each day, those who exercise are as fat as those who don’t: sitting a lot appears to offset some of the benefits of jogging a lot.

So, now of course.. I have even more reason to try to stick it out with the stand up work station. This is an experiment... and I could fail miserably. By the end of today my feet could be killing me... but, if not.. I think this could easily change my health and my work! Bonus!


*somebody say something about a larger waist???

Example A.

**worse profiles of  blood pressure, you say?