A research-led initiative on desk work and the body
A software career asks one thing of your body, thirty thousand hours in a row. It is rarely treated as a load.
State of Health reads the science on sedentary behaviour, movement, recovery and adaptation, and turns it into things developers, designers and founders can actually do. No miracle fixes, no fear, no single prescription that suits everybody.
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6 conference deliveries7 sources, each with its DOIEvery claim says what it doesn’t show
01 — The numbers
Full reference list →The damage is slow, cumulative, and easy to ignore until it isn’t.
Nothing about a bad desk setup hurts on day one. It compounds like interest, which is exactly why it escapes the kind of debugging engineers are otherwise good at. Here is what shows up in the literature.
73%
Of 559 Dutch children scanned on MRI around age ten, the share with a disc bulge.
van den Heuvel et al., 2021 · The Spine Journal · 10.1016/j.spinee.2020.10.003
3 hrs
Unbroken sitting reduced leg-artery dilation in 12 young men. Five-minute walking breaks prevented it.
Thosar et al., 2015 · Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise · 10.1249/MSS.0000000000000479
4,500+ genes
Muscle genes whose expression changed after nine days of bed rest, in 20 healthy young men.
Alibegovic et al., 2010 · American Journal of Physiology-Endocrinology and Metabolism · 10.1152/ajpendo.00590.2009
02 — What they don’t show
Each of those numbers stops somewhere, and this is where.
A study answers the question it was designed to answer and nothing past it. Reading three findings without their limits is how the internet ended up full of confident nonsense about sitting.
A disc bulge on a child’s MRI
One scan per child, at one moment, in a population cohort. Nothing in that design shows cause, or what happened to any of them afterwards.
van den Heuvel et al., 2021 · The Spine Journal · 10.1016/j.spinee.2020.10.003
Three hours of unbroken sitting
Twelve healthy young men, one afternoon in a laboratory. It measures an artery on the day, not health over a career.
Thosar et al., 2015 · Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise · 10.1249/MSS.0000000000000479
Nine days of bed rest
Nine days of bed rest in 20 healthy young men — a heavier dose of inactivity than desk work. It measures gene expression and insulin action, not disease.
Alibegovic et al., 2010 · American Journal of Physiology-Endocrinology and Metabolism · 10.1152/ajpendo.00590.2009
03 — What changes it
How a team runs this →You cannot always erase what has accumulated. You can change the direction you are heading in.
Trajectory is the thing worth working on. Capacity is built slowly, from changes small enough that you will still be doing them in a year.
What this project will not do: promise reversal, sell posture as morality, or hand you a routine that ignores your history, your job and your day.
What it will do: show the evidence, show its limits, and be specific about what to try first and how to tell whether it is working.
What it doesn’t showIts primary outcome is sitting time, not disease. The improvements in stress, wellbeing and vigour were small, and follow-up stops at 12 months.
Edwardson et al., 2022 · BMJ 378:e069288 · 10.1136/bmj-2021-069288