Why Every Office Should Switch To Walking Desks

Man was not meant to spend all day hunched over a dimly lit screen; disturbingly high incidences of obesity, joint pain and fatigue are our bodies’ not-so-subtle ways of saying they want to get up and move around. After piloting a walking desk – a standing desk attached to a treadmill – for a month, I’m convinced they should become the default workstation. Immediately, my daily calorie burn jumped 30.7 percent, and I lost 3 pounds and a percent of body fat in a week. I also experienced less joint pain throughout the day. What Is A Walking Desk? The Lifespan TR-1200-DT5 (retail: $1,500) places a square standing desk atop standard-size treadmill (74″). Instead of a large front dashboard, a relatively discrete control panel for speed is attached on the body-facing side of the desk. Speed varies from .4 MPH to 4MPH (about the pace of a light run). Getting Started With Slow But Steady Adjustments Migrating to the walking desk was relatively easy: I just plopped my laptop and monitor down on the squarish 46-inch desk and got to work. The intuitive interface lets you choose several tracking mechanisms for calorie burn and distance. The first day I couldn’t walk more than an hour at a time before I felt like I was losing concentration. It also takes some getting used to walking like a Tyrannosaurus rex (arms tucked-in and elbows bent at the keyboard). At first, I would work for an hour walking, and then sit for 30 minutes. The first day I walked about four hours. Now I only rest once a day. It also took a bit to develop the musculature in my upper back to support raised arms for hours on end. This is no longer a problem. After experimenting with different speeds, I now vary between .8 and 1.2, picking up speed in the late morning/early afternoon to offset the natural fatigue that precedes the morning news rush. Every so often I have to lean on my elbows or straddle the rails to take a break. Burning More Calories While it’s intuitive to think that walking for an extra 5 to 8 hours a day would burn more calories, recent scientific evidence suggested otherwise. A study of “exergames” – video games that require full-body movement – found “no evidence that children receiving the active video games were more active in general, or at any

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