The New Year is here. To ring in the occasion, many of us will have a few cocktails and hors d'oeuvres, stay out well past our bedtimes -- and vow to start eating right and exercising more in 2017. Some will abandon that resolution within a matter of days. Others will make it a few weeks. But few of us will stay true to our promise to get healthy. Overall, just 8 percent of people who make a New Year's resolution actually achieve their goal.

It doesn't have to be that way. Americans are overlooking an easy way to get healthy, one that can be accomplished with almost no additional effort. And that's simply standing more.

Shedding pounds has long been among the most popular New Year's resolutions. Four in ten of those who make resolutions focus on their weight. The vast majority will fail. It's not hard to see why. People spend most of their time completely still. The average American sits 13 hours every day. In other words, we're glued to chairs for more than half our lives.

A big reason for that is the nature of modern-day work. Since 1950, jobs where folks are tied to a desk have increased 83 percent. Today, only two in ten jobs are active -- well below the five in ten that existed half a century ago. That's not just impeding folks' ability to stay lean; it's threatening their ability to stay alive. Sedentary people are more than twice as likely to develop type 2 diabetes and almost two-and-a-half times more likely to develop heart disease than those who maintain an active lifestyle. And prolonged sitting is behind up to 173,000 cases of cancer every year. Worse still, research shows that even an hour of rigorous exercise is insufficient to undo the damage of a day's worth of sitting.

Via ki.com >

Just Imagine the sheer joy of a chair that could morph and flex with your every movement, designed to support whichever muscle group was under stress with any particular activity. From a very early age most of us spend a huge proportion of our lives sitting – at a desk mostly. And this is despite the fact that we know, from the screaming of our bodies and from all the medical research, that this is really bad for us and causes untold problems.

The trouble is that by the time we have any ergonomic seating solution on offer it’s too late – the damage has already been done. It’s no wonder that products promising ergonomic miracles proliferate – the demand is huge thanks to enduring at least a couple of decades of poor posture due to seating chosen more for budget reasons than out of respect for the human frame.

So just suppose we could have a chair whose form was fluid, not solid; that was engineered to mould itself to mirror our movements and to constantly sense the level of support required for the neck, shoulders, spine, lumbar, kidney, coccyx, gluteus maximus, upper thigh, knee, calf and every other area of contact. If you think about it, if we had such a chair to use our inclination to move about when we are working would increase a thousand-fold, with all the consequent benefits.

Via designcurial.com

Here are some actionable tips you can use to improve your workspace today via Humanscale.

Via humanscale.com >

A new advisory from the American Heart Association reveals that anyone who sits for hours each day is at risk of developing a variety of health issues. Find out just how dangerous it can be.

Via techrepublic.com >

Are you reading this while standing at your desk? There’s a good chance that you are — standing desks are all the rage.

These desks allow you to work at your “desk job” while standing rather than sitting in a chair. They can be custom built (for thousands of dollars) or you can convert a regular desk into a standing desk at no cost by elevating your computer — one of my colleagues simply placed his computer on a stack of books. Sales of standing desks have soared in recent years; in many cases their sales have far outpaced those of conventional desks.

Via health.harvard.edu >

Developing, implementing and managing an ergonomics process (EP) is a worthwhile endeavor resulting in a positive and rewarding experience for all those involved. When properly constructed it engages and influences employees and management alike in an area that requires our undivided attention, our own health, wellness and safety. A successful ergonomics process will change the way the organization and those within operate on a day to day basis.

Ergonomics is the study of how we work. It is a “human-centered” science integrating the tools and materials we handle, the tasks we perform and the environment we perform the work in. It is about the “goodness of fit”.

Read the article on worksiteinternational.com >

Between writing this blog, freelance designing, and keeping up with friends online I spend a lot of time on my computer. That translated to a whole lot of sitting as well – too much sitting for sure. A couple of months ago I purchased a desk that converts from a sitting to a standing desk. I wasn’t sure how I would adjust, but let me tell you, I will never go back.

At my last house I had a whole room I dedicated to just my office space. I had a large L shaped desk and a big cushioned office chair. With the downsizing, there isn’t an extra room for me to use, let alone space for a large desk or chair. Luckily that gave me a clean slate to rethink my working space and start over.

Read the blog post on myurbanfamily.com >