Standing Desks & Treadmill Desks

It is a well-established scientific fact the human body was simply not designed to sit for many hours at a time. Our ancestors walked an average of eleven miles per day while hunting, gathering, and recreating. Ironically, the very technology we use today to make our lives easier—so we can press buttons to perform our work, communicate, order food, or play games—is also killing us.

What Are the Effects of Sitting Disease?

The advent of computing tools, cellphones, modern transportation, and an overabundance of enticing television programming is having significant detrimental effects on our society’s health as a whole, as now evidenced in the explosive rise of sitting disease. [...]

Sitting disease, in a nutshell, is a wind-down of the body’s metabolism that occurs when we sit for too long at one time. The most direct effect is a lowering of the body’s “resting rate,” called the basal metabolic rate (BMR). Think of it as your heart rate when you’re just sitting still. We burn a few calories just keeping the vital organs working, digesting our last meal, pumping blood through the veins, exercising the brain cells, etc.

Merely standing raises the body’s BMR significantly, as the heart has to work harder to keep the body erect. Walking at a slow pace of 1 to 2 mph raises the BMR further still, and with it, our background calorie burn. The Mayo [...]

One of the most common questions we get at WorkWhileWalking is “How much better is it to use a treadmill desk than just using a standing desk?” Both standing desks and walking desks are enjoying an explosion in popularity, especially in corporate America and SOHO (small office/home office) usage. The latest medical evidence shows that an hour of sitting is as detrimental to your health as smoking a cigarette, and both provide the same key benefit of reducing the hours you spend sitting. But that’s where most of the similarities end.While standing desks and walking desks are terrific implements for the sedentary worker’s battle against sitting disease it’s actually the combination of [...]

We all know the health benefits of treadmill desks in preventing sitting disease. However, exaggerated marketing claims often mislead readers with promises of dramatic weight loss – eye-grabbing headlines like "Lose 50 lbs in a year!" making the rounds. Some eager new treadmill deskers buy into the marketing and expect some kind of miracle panacea – as if their new desk is all they need for a healthy lifestyle. The truth is that, while using a treadmill desk is the best way to combat sitting disease and boost your basal metabolic rate (BMR), it is not a substitute for aerobic exercise (the kind that makes you sweat). Most importantly, a treadmill desk shouldn't be used as a [...]

Over 90% of people who have Type II diabetes struggle with weight problems. The correlation is so direct that most people consider the words “obese” and “diabetic” to be synonymous. In addition to high blood sugars (“hemoglobin A1C”), people suffering from obesity are also more likely to suffer from high blood pressure, high cholesterol, high triglycerides and a high percentage of body fat. Diabetes is now the #1 preventable cause of death in the US, beating out smoking, the longtime scourge of polite society. Hundreds of billions of dollars a year are now spent on diabetes-related health care, yet the disease is wreaking havoc on the lives of the afflicted everywhere.

One thing that we find we need to continually reinforce with newcomers to treadmill desking is that walking at speeds above 2 mph is not recommended because the goal is to raise the basal metabolic rate (BMR), without exercising, i.e. sweating. A traditional running treadmill is designed for cardio workouts. As Dr. James Levine of the Mayo Clinic elaborates in his book Move A Little, Lose A Lot, using a treadmill desk is about engaging in Non-Exercise Activity Thermogenesis (“NEAT”), which affords numerous health and productivity benefits that are complementary to, yet completely distinct from, real aerobic exercise.