Get walking, while working: the treadmill desk
I write, therefore I sit. Sometimes, I sit for six hours a day. Sometimes, eight. Then when I go home, I sit down to eat, and I sit down to watch TV. Although I train up to six times a week, the most common movement my body has been doing for the 20 years that I have been a writer is parking my backside on a flat surface. By doing this, I am apparently shortening my life expectancy by years. I first heard about this at a TED conference in 2013, when Nilofer Merchant gave a five-minute talk about the dangers of sitting. When she said sitting was as bad as smoking, I paid attention. Since then, research about the lethal nature of our over-sedentary lifestyle has come thick and fast. The Journal of the National Cancer Institute: for every two hours of sitting, our risk of lung cancer rises by 6%, colon cancer 8% and endometrial cancer 10%. An Australian study: people who sit for 11 hours or more a day are 40% more likely to die during the next three years. Modern, industrialised humans sit for nine hours a day, but only sleep on average for seven.
The dangers to health of sitting were first raised by Dr James Levine of the US Mayo Clinic in a 1999 paper. He wanted to discover why some people taking in the same amount of calories as others didn’t gain weight. He learned that they were moving around more. The movement wasn’t much: taking the stairs not the lift, doing housework or even just fidgeting. In this influential New York Times piece from 2011, another Mayo clinic doctor talked about how rats’ legs, when made to be immobile, lost 75% of their capacity to remove lipoproteins from the blood. An inactive body quickly loses the ability to produce enzymes that break down fat. Sitting is just all-round bad.
I also think that it has contributed to my running injuries. After Merchant’s talk, I began looking into what I could do differently. I was very active, running marathons, training at least four times a week, usually five. But apparently even that much activity isn’t enough to offset the damage done by the daily slab of inactivity I was putting my body through. My posture is terrible. I hunch. And when I write, I learn forward and hunch even more on my right-hand side. And all my running injuries, from hip to ITB to knee to ankle, have been on my right-hand side. I am neither a doctor nor a scientist, but the solution seemed simple to me. In countries that I have visited where lifestyles are not sedentary – Liberia, Haiti – and where people walk more, I have never seen bad posture.
I needed to walk more. I began to Google. Standing desks in the US were getting more and more common, but I thought standing all day would be exhausting. Then I found out about treadmill desks. Treadmill what? You take a treadmill and you build a desk around it. Or you buy one for £2,000 or so from companies such as Lifespan or TrekDesk. I didn’t have £2,000 to spend, so I went MacGyver. Luckily, the internet has plenty of accounts from people who have done the same thing. The best desk, I learned, is a now-discontinued IKEA Jerker desk, which was a reasonably priced, adjustable-height desk that was sold before standing desks came into fashion. I found one locally and bought it for £9.99, along with a second-hand treadmill from a women in my area for £80. I thought I’d be able to just settle the desk panel on the treadmill arms and I’d be good to go.
Not quite. With the help of a handy friend who also has a studio at East Street Arts in Leeds, where I rent a studio space (and where there are enough artists doing unusual things such as hefting kilns around that a treadmill desk didn’t seem too weird). We sawed out some of the desk panel to fit around the treadmill, installed a shelf above it to put my desktop monitor on, and that was it. I got walking.
This astonished my boyfriend, who assumed that a treadmill desk meant I would be sitting on chair and simply moving my feet. Other people assume that I’d be running. No. I walk, and I work. Of course, I’ve sort of leapt off the deep end, and I’ve made mistakes. I decided to start with 90 minutes and gradually increase it. But I also decided to start in bare feet. Mistake. The treadmill vibrations made my feet ache, and my some nerves around my achilles tendon started to niggle. I have only just resumed running after three months off with an inflamed posterior tibial tendon, so I wasn’t about to knacker my ankle again. Now, I walk in my running shoes with my orthotics. I realised the keyboard shelf was too low, so I raised it a few inches and stabilised it with wooden braces and brackets. Having decided to install a treadmill desk on the two hottest days of the decade, I’ve also invested in a desktop fan, which makes a huge difference.
It’s not a straightforward transition. I can type – I’ve walked for about two miles and burned about 300 calories while writing this – but sometimes I still need to sit down. Research recently showed that concentration was diminished in walking workers, but that doesn’t make sense to me. More metabolic energy will surely lead to more focus, once I have fully adjusted. This 2014 study by Avner Ben-Ner suggests that productivity will even improve.
My fellow studio holders have tried it. One fell off. One thought it was weird. But most looked astonished, then thought it a great idea (though they are artists, who are more likely to be on their feet than us computer slaves). It’s not perfect: because it’s a regular running treadmill, the motor may burn out if forced to operate for hours at walking pace. And it’s not the quietest. But I have generous neighbours and so far they haven’t objected. I should really have a manual treadmill that powers my computer, but first things first.
Today I have walked for 4 miles at 2mph, the pace I find most comfortable. I’ve answered emails, written blog posts and done research on my feet. It’s starting to feel normal. And I’m starting to hope that my posture will improve, my back will loosen its appalling hunched tightness, and my running will benefit hugely. All for a little more than £100.
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