Desk work can take a toll on your body. From tight hips to back pain, your body can suffer from sitting all day.
We’ve taken you through how to set up your desk to sit comfortably, but if you’re looking to be a little more active during the day, a standing desk can be a great idea. One of the best options is a sit-stand desk, since it gives you variability in your day. Variability is the best prevention technique when it comes to day-to-day aches and pains.
If you’re not ready to invest in a hydraulic sit stand desk, or you love the desk you have now, companies like AnthroDesk offer converters that sit on your existing desk to offer the variability of a sit-stand desk at a much lower price.
AnthroDesk was kind enough to send us one of their desk converters to try out, and Alicia (our office manager), has been trying it out for the last few weeks. If you’ve come into the office and wondered what that thing was on the front desk, it was our new sit-stand desk.
We’ve been using the Sliding Standing Desk Converter, one of the more affordable options from AnthroDesk. It works for both laptops and desktops. It is a manual one, so you lift and lower each piece yourself, rather than with an automatic system.
The system is pretty simple, just 3 trays and 4 poles make up the entire unit, which means it’s easy to put together. Alicia put it together in about 20 minutes. Once put together, just sit it on the desk and get to work. When you’re ready to stand, you lift the tray or trays with your computer on it to the desired height and continue working.
When you’re setting up to work at standing, align your keyboard tray so that your shoulders are relaxed and your elbows bend at about a 90 degree angle. Unlike when you’re sitting, slouching is harder standing up, so you won’t need to be quite as precise as when you set up to sit.
If you’ve got a separate monitor and keyboard (either a desktop or a laptop with extra keyboard) you’ll want to have your monitor on the top shelf, lifted so that the top of the screen is approximately at eye level.
Then, when your legs get tired, just carefully lower the tray or trays you’re using back to their original height, grab your chair and get back to work.
For a full tutorial for how to set up your desk to the right height, check out this blog post, for a full description.
A couple of warnings with this particular model:
- ALWAYS put your hand under the tray when you lower them, as they drop very quickly
- Don’t move it around on a white desk. The marks it leaves behind come out easily, but having to clean the surface of your desk every day, especially with a desk as big and white as our front desk, can be frustrating.