Drop Dead Healthy

Five Tips on Treadmill Desks

by Joe Stirt, M.D., anesthesiologist, blogger, and treadmill-desk pioneer

1. Any working treadmill will do to get started—don’t use cost as an excuse. Go to Craigslist and find one for a hundred dollars or less. Sometimes people will give you theirs free if you ask, just to get rid of it. Make sure you turn it on and walk on it before you pay for it. If it can handle 2 mph without sparking or smoking, you’re money.

2. Don’t be fooled by websites advertising treadmill desks for hundreds or thousands of dollars. You have most of what you need in your home and shouldn’t spend more than a hundred dollars (apart from the treadmill) to get a working setup that you can tweak and modify as you go along.

3. The basic setup requires only a stack of crates, boxes, or furniture in front of your treadmill stable enough to support a computer screen and/or TV. Make the stack tall enough that the center of the screen is around eye level as you walk on the treadmill. If you’re forced to look down all the time, your neck and eyes will get tired and you’ll quit.

4. Now you’ll want to lay a board across the treadmill handles for your keyboard. Use books atop the board to elevate the keyboard to where it’s comfortable to type on. The mouse or track pad goes on either side of the keyboard.

5. Start at 0.7 mph. Yes, it’s absurdly slow. But you need to get used to a whole new way of working. Gradually increase your time on the treadmill, and increase your speed in 0.1 mph increments weekly to where you can work comfortably. I’ve been at 2.0 mph for years now, averaging three hours a day.

Within one to two weeks you will start really liking your treadmill work space and likely realize you are feeling better and doing better work than when you were a desk slug. It only gets better. Not to mention that you’ll sleep better and lose weight if you stay with it. If you want more specialized tips or advice, e-mail me: bookofjoe@gmail.com.