As a result of our ongoing involvement with the medical fitness community and our partnership with the American College of Sports Medicine we watched the results published by Dr. Levine from the Mayo Clinic with a lot of interest.  In 2005, Dr. Levine an obesity researcher at the Mayo Clinic and several of his colleagues, built treadmill desks to use at work.  They found that walking at a 1.0 MPH pace burned approximately 100 calories per hour without breaking a sweat.

Several years later, online reviewers of LifeSpan treadmills started building treadmill desks and writing reviews about how to construct them.  We decided it was time to do further research. The internet was the first place we looked for more information.  There was an abundance of reviews, blog content, and video that was critical for us to refine the requirements that consumers were looking for in a treadmill desk.  Things like sore elbows from resting on a hard surface all day, convenience of using the console controls, wiring and cable management all came up in reviewer comments.

Then as we tested products on the market we were surprised by the lack of stability of the desktop platforms and the range of adjustment that was needed to support a full range of users – both short and tall.

Finally we set our engineers to design a treadmill desk to address the improvements that had been identified and to do it at an affordable price.

The TR1200-DT is the result.  Based on the TR1200i treadmill platform, the LifeSpan TR1200-DT has a completely independent desktop to avoid any vibration from walking on the treadmill impacting the desk top surface.  The desktop includes sturdy height adjustment with a simple operating console built into the front of the desk without taking away any of the valuable work space.

We think it’s a great product and would love to thank our customers for influencing the design.

 

Did you know that people with higher levels of sedentary behavior have higher mortality rates than more active individuals, even when they participate in the recommended minimal levels of moderate physical activity?  Researchers speculated that a sedentary lifestyle could have negative effects, even when people aren’t entirely sedentary.  Findings were presented at the American College of Sports Medicine (ACSM) annual meeting in May.  According to Charles E. Matthews, PhD, physical activity epidemiologist and lead author, “Our results indicate that while exercise did reduce risk of early death, even quite high levels of exercise did not overcome the influence of high levels of television viewing on mortality risk… The results add to the growing evidence that the adverse effects of sedentary behavior are independent of the benefits gained from moderate to vigorous activity.”  Read the full article.