That iPad-fitness thing: An update

Posted by Dave on April 15, 2010 | 3 Comments

Last week I wrote a blog post that was a little over the top: Can my iPad help me live longer? It was written a bit tongue-in-cheek, but there’s actually some science backing it up.

The idea was this: If I only use my new iPad while I’m standing up, then maybe I can compensate for my basically sedentary lifestyle of working all day at a desk. As I said, there’s a bit of science backing this up. I screwed up on the mechanism for the effect, though, and Travis Saunders corrected me in the comments:

As for the health risk associated with sitting vs standing, it seems to be mostly due to changes in lipoprotein lipase activity in skeletal muscle, and likely glucose transport proteins as well. I don’t *think* it has as much to do with your heart or blood flow… not that it’s impossible, but I don’t know of any likely mechanisms.

I googled “lipoprotein lipase activity in skeletal muscle” and found this article suggesting that, at least in rats, some very low-intensity muscle use is much better than none.

But mechanism aside, the question is, does this setup actually get me to stand up more during the day? I don’t have a measure of exactly how much time I’m spending standing and using my iPad, but anecdotally it seems to be at least an hour or two a day. Not only am I using it for all of my workday Twitter activity, but I’m also finding it to be a very good way to read and annotate everything from dense scientific studies to my income tax return—things I would ordinarily print out on paper.

I haven’t been using it for all my web surfing, though. Some web sites don’t work as well on the iPad (since Flash isn’t supported), and I also often need to reference sites in my writing, and without a keyboard, there’s not a great way to do that on the iPad. I’m much more efficient sitting at my desk.

One thing I can quantify is how many tweets I’ve been making now that I use the iPad for that exclusively (at least during working hours, that is — on the weekends/evenings I sometimes tweet from my laptop). This graph shows the results:

As you can see, whether or not I include the weekends, my tweeting has declined dramatically over the past week. Why? I think it’s because in my old setup, Tweetdeck was constantly running in the background. If I saw an interesting tweet, I’d reply to it instantly on my computer. Now I only use Twitter during actual breaks (or mini-breaks). I get quite a bit more work done, but I don’t spend hours standing using my iPad. I’m not a bus driver, but I’m not a conductor either. And I am adding an hour or two of standing time every day, which certainly seems better than sitting. Whether it’s enough to make a noticeable difference in my life is probably hard to determine.

Several of commenters on last week’s post said they had their computers mounted in a standing workstation full time—that would certainly be the logical next step, but I’m not sure I’m ready for that.

In any event, I’ll keep you updated over the rest of this month. Maybe as I find additional uses for the iPad I’ll find myself standing and using it more often.

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