Lifehacker is a well-known proponent of standing desks (or at least a well-known clearing house for articles about standing desks), and they’ve recently come out with their newest article on the matter, entitled “Standing on Weekdays Burns Calories Like Running 10 Marathons a Year“.
As the name of the article implies, it seems that standing instead of sitting burns as many calories per year as running ten marathons.
Standing caused the volunteers to have a much higher heart rate (around 10 beats per minute higher), which adds up to burning about 50 calories more per hour versus sitting. Over a year, that adds up to about 30,000 more calories or 8 pounds of fat.
“If you want to put that into activity levels,” Dr Buckley says, “then that would be the equivalent of running about 10 marathons a year. Just by standing up three or four hours in your day at work.”
And of course, it’s just better overall (even if no calorie loss was accounted for), given that sitting is slowly killing you.
Read more here.
Sidenote: major props to the model wearing high heels while on the treadmill standing desk. Respect.