Wednesday, August 24, 2011

Standing Desk Update: My Heel pain is gone.

As I wrote two weeks ago- stand-desk-i-now-have-heel-pain-i-am- I have been sitting at my desk during work again and I am happy to report my heel pain is gone.

Now that I know it definitely was caused by standing I intent to further my experiment since I still believe standing would help my overall health versus sitting- engaging more muscles, focus, extra calorie burn for weight maintenance, etc.


As I see it there could be three possible causes (assuming of course that it just makes sense that as human we can stand/walk as our natural state):

1) Overload: I went from sitting directly to standing for as long as I possibly could with almost no build up- 6-7 hours per day.

2) Standing posture: the video here has some interesting information:

She mentions the Alexander technique which I look into before.  While I was not static or hunched over while I stood, I could be wrong.

3) The dress shoes I was wearing.

For now I will first- stand for half a day on Fridays when it is appropriate to wear my vivos vivobarefoot . Later, I will purchase office appropriate vivobares- dharma:

http://www.vivobarefoot.com/us/mens/dharma-52.html/

Just to recap: I have heel pain when I transitioned from laying to standing or sitting to standing and minor pain when walking in shoes (barefoot, sandals walking/running pain free).

After two weeks of sitting during the day my heel pain is gone, so I will try standing only with minimalist shoes.

I'll keep you posted!

Thanks for reading.

7 comments:

Jeff King said...

keep at it... it will pay off.

i think you're going about it the right way.

Best of luck

Aaron Kulbe said...

I'm having the same issue, but I can't seem to find barefoot / minimalist shoes that fit my very wide feet. (4E for one set of shoes, 6E for my everyday shoes.

rocketsciencesense said...

have you tried the running sandals? check invisibleshoes.com

rocketsciencesense said...

or luna sandals? Check out "Born to Run"

rocketsciencesense said...

I prefer to think of them as Spartan Sandals.

Heel Pain said...

Congratz! but now keep treating your pain like this so that you don't have this pain again..

Zimmermann Podiatry said...

Wow!Amazing mate that your heel pain leesburg was gone. Yes, you are right sitting always have a very bad impact on our health so its better to stand or exercise daily to avoid this kind of pain.