I'm totally not sold on the practically of so-called walking desks.
Reading text on a screen whilst your head is bobbing up and down, trying to make fine-motor-movements to click and type whilst walking, sounds like a recipe for low productivity.
Why not get 3 hours of real work done, followed by 1 hour of real exercise, rather than 4 of neither?
Or if you're determined to combine (computer) work with exercise, a reclined exercise bike you can slide under a proper desk might be the better bet... at least your upper-body will be stable then.
Kudos for at least thinking about your health, anyway!
For the last month and a half, I've been using a treadmill desk for 1-3 hours every day. I walk at 2mph (a nice slow pace I can do consistently without thinking) and it's been absolutely fantastic. It doesn't make reading or typing difficult (the desk is well-stabilized and my Thunderbolt display is on a very heavy arm), and I'm down nearly 25lbs since I started, thanks to a combination of diet and exercise.
Get a keyboard with a trackpoint [1]. It will take some time to get used, but in the end you will not need any mouse anymore with the advantage of being pretty comfortable using laptops in trains, aircrafts and on walking desks.
>Reading text on a screen whilst your head is bobbing up and down, trying to make fine-motor-movements to click and type whilst walking, sounds like a recipe for low productivity.
You are walking too fast.
>Why not get 3 hours of real work done, followed by 1 hour of real exercise, rather than 4 of neither?
I program all day long and I spend about half my day at a walking desk like this one.
I was distracted by the bobbing up and down for the first day. It was a little less distracting by the second day. And by the third day I didn't even notice it. I was able to get in my regular programming zone with ease.
In fact, I find that walking can often get me focused faster.
But, I am somewhat of a kinesthetic learner. Motion helps me think. So your mileage may vary.
It's a good solution for a programmer or designer. It's a terrible solution for someone whose phone calls will be distracted by the, otherwise minor, ambient noise of a treadmill.
I recently completed a year long effort to convince my employer to deploy standing desks (turned out to be VariDesks). We must have hundreds of them now and many people are standing and love them.
The general concensus (currently) seems to be that 8 hours of sitting (read not ever moving around) is bad for you whether you excercise or not. I would think an under-desk bike like you describe would also be effective in remedying the problems caused by sedentary work. I'm thinking about adding a balance board like someone else here suggested.
http://i.imgur.com/pnWrc.jpg
I use a walking desk for about 8 hours a day. I found that about 1.2mph is my sweet spot where it doesn't affect my productivity at all.
Took me a few weeks to get used to walking all day, but now it's completely natural.
The screen looks big enough and is in front of the treadmill. This should be alright. I used to read my kindle while running on a treadmill. This shouldn't be much of an issue at all, especially since we are talking about walking slowly.
I built something similar a few years back. Walking at a snail's pace for a few hours a day was nice for bloodflow and focus. Then I started getting major headaches. I went to the doctor and couldn't figure out what was wrong.
Then I realized that my head bobbing up and down while staring at my screen was causing it. Stopped using the desk and it went away. I raised my screen to eye level and that helped. But the headaches still occurred so I reluctantly quit. Maybe I walk funny or I'm sensitive to it, but I'd like to warn anyone doing this to make sure you don't make yourself sick. Beyond that, have fun and good luck explaining it to others :)
I used a walking desk for 4 months straight at 2 mph for 6 hours a day. The first few months where good but then I started getting terrible hip and joint pains. I ended up quitting because it hurt too much.
After the fact, I think I just wore out my shoes and had no dampening left in them. Get good shoes...often.
This is a cool project. However, when I tried this, I hound the forced rhythm (and noise) too distracting to be productive. When I removed the treadmill and went to a pure standing desk, something magical happened: it became a dancing desk instead. I still got the high heart-rate and full body motion from jamming to music, and could trivially bounce and pace around the room when stuck and needing to think. (I'm one of those people who paces while thinking yet before this I seldom integrated this into code.)
Yea, I think that's generally the idea. It's less about the standing and more about the constant weight shifting one does while standing up, everything remains engaged and you get some normal health benefit from it. My back hurts a lot when I sit in a chair all day (even a really nice chair), so I prefer to spend most of the day standing.
Funny, one of the companies I was contracting with last summer got so wrapped up in this craze, they devoted an entire room to walking desks. You could go in there when you wanted and work. They have 8 treadmills rigged with a desktop so you could plug in your laptop and mouse and work while you were walking.
Never saw more than two or three people in there at a time, but the company made a big deal out of it. It looked pretty awkward, even when people were walking really slow.
I am in the minority on this, but quite skeptical of exercise for exercise's sake. If exercise isn't fun, your brain is probably trying to tell you it isn't that great for you. Yes, I've read the research but remain unconvinced, I think the "need" for constant exercise may be a symptom of an underlying physiological problem.
Your body is optimized for saving energy, because for millions of years starvation was a plausible outcome of wasted energy. This is the same reason sweets and fatty foods taste better than kale. You're evolved to prefer energy-dense foods.
Given that you post to HN, starvation is not a likely scenario for you. Diabetes, obesity, heart failure, these are all health issues you could face, and they are not things your body is evolved to avoid, because they were comparatively minimal issues for millions of years.
The "underlying physiological problem" is that we are just not evolved to overeat and be sedentary.
I don't think the data supports the scarcity hypothesis. Unquestionably we evolved to cope with scarcity. But humans often lived in periods of high food availability. I think it is reasonable to assume my body is evolved to deal with both high and low calorie environments, if it is functioning properly. Anecdotal data bears this out as well. There are many people, including myself, who have dramatically varied their caloric intake and exercise habits with fairly minor changes in body composition.
> But humans often lived in periods of high food availability.
Outside of the post-civilization period (which is trivial in duration in terms of timelines required for substantial evolutionary change given human reproduction patterns), I don't think sizable populations of humans have lived for significant periods of times in conditions where large volumes of food were available that didn't require substantial physical exertion to access.
"High food availability", sure, that occurred, but that only means a low risk of starvation with exertion to extract food from the environment. It is a very different thing than being able to avoid starvation while spending most of your time sedentary.
>But humans often lived in periods of high food availability. //
It's not just high food availability we have - I'm a few steps away from a ton of high calorie foods and could get more sent to my house without leaving my chair. In the past, even with plentiful supply, one had to [generally] put in some effort to get food. That doesn't seem to be the case for many now.
In the scenario of high food availbility meaning there's plenty of fruit to gather (and process to save for winter) and there's plenty of deer to chase then I can see I'd get more exercise.
There is a point where exercise stops being un-fun. I'm currently around that point - I've been doing pole dance for the past few months. The first few sessions were hard as hell, but as my body got into better shape, and I started to learn some grace in the moves, it's been a blast.
It also helps that learning a style of dance engages my mind. Gives me something to focus on instead of mindlessly pumping out reps.
Reading text on a screen whilst your head is bobbing up and down, trying to make fine-motor-movements to click and type whilst walking, sounds like a recipe for low productivity.
Why not get 3 hours of real work done, followed by 1 hour of real exercise, rather than 4 of neither?
Or if you're determined to combine (computer) work with exercise, a reclined exercise bike you can slide under a proper desk might be the better bet... at least your upper-body will be stable then.
Kudos for at least thinking about your health, anyway!