Enterprising Wellness: Stepping NEAT-ly
Part VII in a series about benefits from standing while working.
My first demonstration of a treadmill desk came onboard a Walkstation in Steelcase’s Merchandise Mart showroom during a recent NeoCon. I clambered onto the device, and all was well until someone hit the “go” button. Although I knew I was standing on a treadmill, I was unprepared for it to start milling, if you will. Neither was I ready for walking toward a desk while being unable to get to it. With more experience, I am sure I could become more competent. I have not boarded a Walkstation since, but fortunately many others have, and they love them.
At the time of my awkward introduction to the treadmill desk concept, I did not know it was an evolution of the device the Mayo Clinic’s James Levine had concocted for his studies. Dr. Levine was prepared to unleash evidence on the working world that would bring workers to their feet. That was his intention, at least.
Taking A Stand on the Work Front
For those readers who have been following these posts since the first, I have shared two distinct yet related expressions of what the human body was designed to do. From Peter Katzmarzyk, the body’s design is for movement. From Tony Schwartz, it was intended to expend energy, then have time to recuperate, but not to expend energy continuously. An as yet unexplored expression of the body’s design for physical work comes from Nicolas Pronk.
In preparing my thoughts for these posts and my paper, what I believe is most noteworthy of Dr. Levine’s work is how he addressed each theory of the human body’s design intent.
We have seen research that physical inactivity at work is a factor in obesity. Research also shows us that energy consumption in the human body drops nearly to zero when sitting or when physically inactive. Also that even short bouts of sitting triggers previously unknown metabolic processes with unhealthy consequences. And, physical inactivity over time in a way compounds these consequences and can contribute to mental distress and musculoskeletal disorders.
What Dr. Levine accomplished was the combination of ideas for getting workers out of their chairs with activity for keeping the body’s metabolism healthily active. His approach integrated calorie-burning movement into the workday while engaging muscles and supporting metabolic health, muscular health, and mental health. He called it Non-Exercise Activity Thermogenesis, handily abbreviated as NEAT.
What is Nonexercise Activity?
The essence of Dr. Levine’s discovery is that a beneficial kind of activity exists between watching television and working with a personal trainer. Other researchers established TV watching as an inactivity benchmark because it involves little or no muscle movement, offering little or no energy consumption. On the other end of the spectrum is structured exercise, a dynamic, high-energy consumption event. What lies in the middle is nonexercise activity.
Dr. Levine recently told USA Today that walking at 1 mile per hour has very substantial benefits, such as doubling metabolic rate and improving blood sugar levels. He said, “Although you don’t sweat, you body moving is sort of purring along.”
It is about accepting life’s daily activities as good for one’s health, and encouraging more of these activities in the workplace. Examples of nonexercise activity could include pacing while on the phone, scheduling walking meetings, parking in a distant spot, using mass transit or using half of the lunch hour for a midday walk.
The article continued that Dr. Levine’s ideas have grabbed the attention of companies with hopes to help employees with their health, drop pounds and lower stress levels. A follow-on consequence of this, says Dr. Levine, is that it could mean lower insurance costs and higher productivity.
How Does Nonexercise Activity Come to Work?
The change that will begin helping to create healthier workplaces involves reversing what Dr. Levine calls “addiction to the chair.” Closely connected with that notion is his comment that half of the world’s population now works behind a computer whereas 20 years ago this was less than one percent. And in many of those computer-centered jobs are workers allowed little time away from their desks.
To these scenarios, what Dr. Levine would advise interior designers and architects to do is persuade individual workers to stand where they once sat. Choose wireless telephones that allow workers more movement, or provide any of the new active seating products instead of a chair. The emphasis is on movement options that workers can select for themselves.
A second insight would be outfitting the workplace to encourage people to get back on their feet. As might be imagined, the ways of accomplishing this a limited only by creativity and, possibly, budget. Inviting stairwells, walking tracks, informal meeting areas with standing-height furnishings and any progressive thinking toward the goal of keeping workers engaged in even the slightest of movements.
Finally, include in evaluations of workplace needs the objective of creating more movement for each worker during the workday. To have a survey of what workers establish as stressful or helpful or wishful in their environments may lead to responding more closely to their mental and physical needs. But what should this survey contain and what should it attempt to establish? More on that in the next post.
“Establishing Sit-Stand Wellness Cultures in Large Enterprises” can be downloaded from the Interior Architecture homepage at aia.org.
Stephen Witte is a freelance writer, speaker and researcher specializing in the contract industry. The IIDA Knowledge Center and the AIA have accepted his research. His current projects involve workplace health, renewable energy and business trends.
