University of Tasmania Faculty of Education researchers Drs Scott Pedersen and Dean Cooley won't tell you that sitting at a desk all day is killing you – but they can easily demonstrate that it could.
Research shows sitting for more than four hours each day can lead to increased risk factors associated with cardiovascular disease, diabetes and obesity.
It's this fact that has led the innovative physical educators on a passionate quest to propel office-based employees out of their chairs to avoid health problems later in life.
In 2010 they created Exertime, a computer-based health initiative to reduce the amount of occupational sitting, which can add up to eight hours a day in some organisations, to stints of no more than four hours and preferably no more than 45 minutes at a time.
The easy-to-use software provides a series of physical activities that are suitable to be completed at a desk or around the office.
The Exertime prompt has the ability to take over the employees' computer screen every 45 minutes (which can be delayed for up to 15 minutes, but not removed), to force workers out of their chair to perform a short bout of physical activity.
The software allows the users to tailor the types of activity they do and to track their non-sitting time and calories burned.
"Our research shows that short bouts of movement during the workday have a positive effect on the health of desk-based employees," Dr Pedersen said.
"This is important because we now know that after one hour of sitting the body's metabolism grinds to a halt, creating an unhealthy outcome.
"Surprisingly, even healthy, athletic people who take up a desk job can expect to gain up to five kilograms in a year despite their commitment to exercise outside work time."
Following the launch of Exertime, a partnership called Project PAUSE (Physical Activity Using Short-burst Exercise) was formed with Tasmania Police to trial the intervention.
The trial demonstrated that adding extra movement to the working day of Tasmania Police department employees, such as standing up to take telephone calls, significantly lowered their blood pressure over a 13-week period.
The success of the trial had such a profound effect on police, that the State Government awarded a $76,000 grant to Drs Cooley and Pedersen to make Exertime available to all public servants and local government.
To date, Tasmania Police, Tasmania Fire Service, Department of Health and Human Services, Department of Justice and Kingborough Council have all initiated the health and wellbeing program, and the University of Tasmania has recently made the software available to all university employees.
Drs Pedersen and Cooley's research in the field and development of Exertime continues to gain momentum with collaborations involving the University of Tasmania's School of Human Life Sciences and School of Psychology.
At a recent health and wellbeing lunchtime seminar for UTAS staff, the benefits of using Exertime were reinforced, and Drs Cooley and Pedersen announced they have begun clinical investigations in this area utilising the new Active Work Experiment (AWE) laboratory on the Newnham campus.
They will be investigating the use of a variety of "hot desks" to assess changes in employees' health and wellbeing.
The work stations in the AWE lab are not typical work desks – they require the user to move during work either by walking on a treadmill, riding a stationary bike or stepping on a cross-trainer.
"We are not asking employees to break a sweat during work, we just want them to stop sitting so much. Our bodies were not designed to sit for long bouts of time," Dr Pedersen said.
For more information on Exertime, go to www.exertime.com