There are many reasons why you might want to try a stand up workstation

After working in an office, sitting in front of a computer for many years it can really start to take a toll on your health. My main complaint use to be from sitting all day in the office and then going rollerblading in the evenings, I would shorten my hip flexor muscles all day and then over stretch them in the afternoon. Yoga and stretching is by far the best thing I have found for keeping my muscles from shortening throughout the day, but over time I wanted more movement as I’d find too much sitting to make me quite sleepy and dull. I started by building my own stand up workstation and so can you, obviously there are different stand up desks available now on the market and you can go out and buy one, but because I love flexibility and am always travelling I’m quite happy with the functional, low budget workstations I create.

I started with buying a desk from Officeworks – you’ll need something with good height to sit your monitors on. I’ve used boxes wrapped together to get the right height for mouse and keyboard. With time I started to get a sore neck as I wasn’t quite tall enough for how high the monitors are so I went out to Bunnings and brought some foam mats with a yoga mat on top. I also started to get a pain in the base of my hand using the mouse because of the different angle to when you sit, buying a ergonomic mouse pad fixed this.

Now I have everything at the perfect heights and I don’t have any unwanted aches and pains – you’ll need to do a little trial and error to get everything ergonomically correct for your body, but there is plenty of information online to find out what height everything should be, but better than that I think you have to setup, trial your workstation, if you get any pain in the body just work out what you need to adjust.

When you first start using a stand up workstation it can hurt your feet if you aren’t use to standing all day so make sure you have some sort of foam mat to stand on to support your body. I also invested in a Officeworks drafting chair which gives me the flexibility to sit up high or at my other desk down low.

I love the flexibility of being able to stand all day, move around and dance to the music in my creative little zone!