Designing to Confront the Adverse Health Impacts of Workplace Sitting

An ecological perspective on designing to confront the adverse health outcomes of workplace sitting acknowledges that components of both the physical-environmental and social-organizational contexts join with individual motivations and preferences to influence sitting patterns and overall time spent in such sedentary behaviors in the workplace. Workplace design that sets out to explicitly promote more movement and less sitting holds great promise to provide much-needed preventive health solutions. The importance of regularly engaging in combinations of moderate-intensity and vigorous-intensity physical activity and planned exercise to maintain good health and reduce risk of premature mortality from the major chronic diseases and a range of other health problems is now well understood. Exercising and physical activities that confer important health benefits include not only vigorous-intensity exercise such as jogging and swimming but also moderate-intensity activity such as brisk walking and cycling. Reducing overall workplace sitting time and promoting frequent, brief interruptions to sitting time has considerable potential to provide widespread health benefits.