Standing Desk - Week One

The past several weeks I've been dealing with back/leg pain.  At some point along the way sitting has become a challenge.  Sometimes I can sit for a little while, but often its only a few minutes before it becomes uncomfortable.  I have a job that often leaves me at my desk sitting, but with sitting being painful I needed come up with a backup plan. My backup plan was setting up a stand up desk.

My stand up desk consists of an old server sitting on my workbench  with my laptop, a couple monitors, and a keyboard and mouse.  The server on the bench brings my work height up to 44 1/2"  from the floor.   This height seems to be a really good height for me, as it is close to the height of my elbows from the floor when standing.. The monitors might be a touch low, but in my case the overhead cabinets would start to interfere if I went much higher.

So what can I say about using the stand up desk? I do like walking up to my desk and having everything at my height and not having to sit down to use my computer.  It makes it nice for those moments you need to walk up to your computer, do something and walk away.  It also keeps me moving more which has some definite health befits.  The bad part of the stand up desk is I'm sore at the end of the day.  My body and my feet are not used to standing all day. With that said I'm in enough pain that I can't sit anyway so I can't say all my pain is from standing.

I've read that for some people it takes weeks for their body to adjust to standing desks.  Based on my pain that forced my into a standing desk I can't really say much about the short term beside standing is still more comfortable than sitting right now. I think in the end I'd like to find a balance between sitting and standing.  I'm still working on just how to achieve that in my normal work area and hopefully lead to a couple health benefits that come with reducing my sitting time.