My Stand Up Desk

Stand Up Desk

Those who know me often ask about my back.

The answer is, my back is much better but it's an ongoing battle to manage and care for it.

One part of this is that I am careful not to sit for more than an hour at a time. If I'm working, I just stand-up and keep working with my nifty stand-up desk.

This year, my back is sore but no problems. Of course, it's only March.  I've skied and biked and swam a lot.  I'm hoping to go do tri sprints again this summer but this means that I need to start running again. I've run about a mile and a half three times this year and each one took a lot more than I expected and left me pretty sore for most of a week.

My last real back spasm was in Sept 2015 when, feeling pretty good in the morning, I did some squats but for some reason, I did it while holding my little dog over and in front of my head. This turns out to be really stressful on the back and it triggered a pretty bad spasm. That spasm was the day of the SOFL Edcamp which I managed to get thru by using the back brace and some drugs.

A bigger spasm was in March 2015 when Carmen was in Cuba. I triggered it by playing way too much tennis on a Sunday and then, when I tried to do situps  on Tuesday am,  my back when into a full spasm making it almost impossible to get off the floor or move. This one took about two weeks in the back brace before I could move again.

So that's the status, I'm writing this both to promote the standing desk and also, I'm trying to keep better records about my back status. So, to help me keep track, I'm listing the previous posts on this topic.

Previous posts related to ergonomics and desks and back problems:

BB at 57 - Status Report  - May 2015

Staying Fit Over Fifty, Recent Challenges - Nov 2013

Breaking the Cycle of Chronic Back Problems March 2013

By Back Strategy - Sept 2011

BBat50 is on the comeback trail! April 2011

Resolving Nagging Back Problems - March 2011

Training for training - Jan 2009

More Back Problems - Nov 2008

My desk ergonomics - The details - Nov 2008

My desk ergonomics - The details

I'm still working on my back problem which are caused, I believe, by the poor ergonomics from my new desk. (You need the read previous post on this topic to know what I'm going on about). In any case, at age 50, in balancing karate and everything, I'm now badly out-of-whack and need to rebalance. I'm now going on my third month of on-again-off-again back problems.

As Kyoshi would say, if you could measure it, you can manage it. So I've taken out my tape measure (Yes, I know that this is not exactly what he intended what he meant it. But the spirit is the same. Find tools to solve problems. In this case, I'm using a tape measure.) and here's what I've found:

The height of the desk means that my arms would have to be held really high to use my keyboard. This would be a disaster for my back and shoulders.

The usual solution to such problems is to raise the chair adding a footrest to make sure that my feet have some support. But, since my desk has a drawer where I should be sliding under the desk, this won't work. I can't get my legs under my desk. So instead, I stretch my arms in all sorts of funny ways or slide down in my chair. What's frustrating is that I do have a nice upscale chair with about five different adjustments.

Solutions:

1. Cut out the drawer and put a keyboard & mouse drawer there instead. This creates room for my legs by getting rid of the drawer and allows me to construct an arm rest at the right height.
2. Have a keyboard mouse drawer that attaches under the drawer or even to the chair which comes out at about the height of the current desk drawer.

In either case, a little shopping, carpentry, and cleverness are called for. I'm a little frustrated in that I have a very similiar problem at my regular (not home) office and that I can't seem to get any real help from the people who can sell me the gadgets that I need to install. Isn't there a consultant somewhere that will come in, tell me what has to be done, and do it for me?