Treadmill Workstation

coondoggie writes "Did you know you could lose as much as 66 pounds by sweating on your PC? Well using the Mayo Clinic's vertical workstation, that just might be the weight loss wave of the future. The vertical workstation is basically a desk mounted over a treadmill that lets office workers to kill two birds with one stone — send emails, check invoices and write reports and burn calories at the same time, say Professors James Levine and Jennifer Miller of the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, who came up with the machine/desk. There are other things you can try as well. For example, the FPGamerunner, a USB full-size treadmill that works with any first-person shooter (FPS) game, has you covered. Walking on the treadmill moves your character through the game. Handlebars and buttons at the front of the $1,299 treadmill control your direction and fire your weapons." This seems like a lot better idea than me trying to collect Pokemon on an elliptical trainer which will no doubt one day lead to a very embarrassing obituary.

Comments

My workout

[Pojut]

I lift 4 days a week and do cardio 3 days a week. One of those cardio sessions every week is actually done on a stationary bike while playing video games.

It works fantastically...I find that I will stay on that bike for a MUCH longer time (roughly 30 minutes longer) if I am actively engaged with something other than my legs moving

Re:My workout

[0100010001010011]

I'd comment that running and biking use the arms differently. Moving your arms is proper form for running while it is not for biking. I'd suspect that on a bike you'd be able to concentrate using your arms better (after all they're supposed to be available for steering).

Re:My workout

[FST777]

Partly. When seriously working out on a bike, you use your arms for strength (pulling your arms while pushing with the legs). Steering on a bike is indeed done with the arms at low speeds, but less so at high speeds. You then use your arms for strength and stability and use weight displacing to steer.

When you apply any serious force on a bike you need your arms to prevent yourself from sliding backwards out the sadle. Gaming can then become... interesting.

Great

[thbigr]

I work for an Electric company. I suppose they will want to sell the power that is generated.

One consideration

[dreddnott]

I'd like to know whether this USB Treadmill is bus-powered, or if I'll have to deal with the inconvenience of plugging yet another power brick into my surge suppressor...

Riiiight...

[Mockylock]

I wonder how many people will get wrapped up in the game, bust their ass and get shot across the room after they've been "PWNED".

"Well doctor, someone was spawn raping us and the next thing I know, I was trying to pry my head from under the sofa. I was pwned."

My users can bearly walk and chew gum

[techpawn]

I'd love to see them walk on a treadmill and try to send email at the same time.
Granted, IT would get called to fix the treadmill if it broke.

Your mileage may vary?

[thousandinone]

I dunno how effective it would be for me. I have to get up to a pretty decent run to get my heart rate to a point where its any real benefit, and I doubt I could type well at a run. As for FPS, most of them already reduce your accuracy when your toon is moving; compound that with the physical movement of your body and you probably won't be hitting much; this problem could be mitigated by just having pixel perfect aim in the game and letting the actual movement be the cause of inaccuracy, but I can see that being abused...

Re:Your mileage may vary?

[Chmcginn]

100 calories per hour * 8 hours per day = 800 per day. 5 days a week = 4000 calories per week. That's like running a marathon. Just over 40 hours instead of 3 or 4.

Only for the hardcore gamer

[The-Ixian]

Imagine moving that treadmill controller around to LAN parties. Only the most dedicated to weight-loss would attempt it, but man would it be hilarious to see the 300 pound guy sweating his ass off getting that thing through the door.

It really works

[pytheron]

According to xe.com, you lose 655 pounds straight away !!

Geeks arguing about exercise

[etully]

Geeks arguing about exercise. Yeah - this oughta be good.

And another

[dreddnott]

I posted the above as kind of a joke, but I became curious and visited the official Gamerunner website.

Apparently the treadmill actually will sell for $495 plus S&H, once they get their store going.

And from looking at the actual manual for the thing (warning: PDF!) it looks like it uses two USB connectors (one for keyboard, one for mouse) and the display panel is powered by two AA batteries. You'd think there would be enough bus power in two connectors to power a low-end LCD display.

Some more info.....

[apodyopsis]

Some more info.....

BBC covered this in detail, one of their reporters tried it out. She was less then enthusiastic about office work whilst using the thing "Shame my hands can't keep up, it took me almost five minutes to key in the above without a single mistake." (from the linked article below).

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/6656631.stm?ls

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/6657305.stm

Weight loss thru exercise alone is a fallacy

[deacon]

Do the math. Brisk walking burns 7 calories a minute. A McDonalds value meal has 1170 calories. You have to walk briskly for 167.14 minutes to burn off those calories. That's 2 hours 47 minutes. Of walking. Briskly.

Exercise has important health benefits and you should be doing it. But to lose weight, you need
to control your food intake. All the fad diets and pills are bullshit and possibly harmful as well. Eat less calories, and you will lose weight. And while you are at it, cut out all the hydrogenated fats. Eating lard would be less harmful. If you are addicted to nicotine, get your fix thru a method other than smoking or chewing.

Yes I am ranting. But I hate to see people oblivious to the fact that they are
ruining their health and quality of life by ingesting obscenely excessive amounts of harmful "food" products and nicotine delivery systems. Know why all the old people you see on the street are thin like birds? Because most of the fat people died when they were 50 years old, and the rest of them are confined in a nursing home waiting to die.

Re:Weight loss thru exercise alone is a fallacy

[SCHecklerX]

Somewhat true. But we don't all exercise alike. I'm currently 235 lbs. In the winter I take a cyclist-specific 2 hour spin class once a week. I've burned almost 3000 calories in 2 hours in those sessions.

I've used the hacker's diet (which adheres basically to what you state). But I've found I do much better just consciously eating less, and exercising a lot more. It's now cycling season, and I have for the most part recovered from the surgeries that were keeping me from exercising over the winter months, and the lbs are melting away without me having to suffer through a strict calorie-counting diet.

Granted, I'm not a typical case. Most people certainly would not do a few days a week on the bikes (a couple of days of singletrack, and a few on the road), and certainly wouldn't go through 50ish miles at a time with a lot of climbing.

But to state that exercise has little to do with weight loss depends on the type of exercise that you do. It certainly does feel a lot better to exercise more than it does to eat less. And at the intensity levels that I personally exercise at, it certainly does have a large impact. Of course, eating less is also part of the equation, but if you put the emphasis on that part, you will be miserable, at least for awhile. And who wants to be stuck in calorie-counting mode all their lives in order to control their weight?

Notes from a talk

[espressojim]

I saw the guy who is organizing the research on this (NEAT), who gave a 90 minute talk at my institution last year (we study the genetics of diabetes.) I figured this might be an interesting place to share my notes. The notes are slightly raw, but might be of interest (and there's nothing that's under NDA in them.)

-----------

Non-exercise activity thermogenesis.

Uses 2x-3x the calories of exercise.

Varies by up to 2000 calories between individuals

Note: most people of the world don't exercise

Neat explains why an active person can burn 2000 calories more than an inactive person of the same size.

Occupational NEAT:
chair bound:300
seated work: 700
standing: 1000
active: 1400
agricultural: 2300

Women work a heck of a lot more than men. (peak 500 minutes/day women vs. 320/day men)

A test that overfed people by 1000 calories a day:
Some people didn't gain weight, they just increased their NEAT.
Some central mechanisms may be regulating NEAT.

There are chemical ways to induce neat (Central Orexin)

Spontaneous physical activity may not be spontaneous!

People who fail to increase NEAT: maybe they have a NEAT defect?

They built sensors integrated into clothing to see what body postures were like.

Looks like lean people stand up more, and obese subjects sit a lot more.

Overfeed underweight people, underfeed overweight people ->
        Starting obese people still sit more, Starting lean people tend to stand more.

Perhaps fat people just have 'poor NEAT adaptation'

Think about this: there's no inherent reason why we ought to be sitting all the time.

Are there ways to get us all out of our chairs?
1) Persuade them to stand (behavior modification)
2) Get rid of the chair (environmental change)

------1------
STRIPES
Targeted goals help people change behavior.
Select->Target goals->Reward->identify bariers->Plan->Evaluate->Sustain->Target Goals
Lady starts at 3 5 second walks a day.
She's working up to 5 5 minute walks over time.

Barrier: if you decide to walk your dog in the rain,the rain is the barrier. If you're massivly fat, tying shoes might be the barrier.

Planning is representative of prioritization.

------2-------

The way you change the environment - do a walk and talk meeting program (at least you get something out of it!) "Walk and talk tag - you are not to be interrupted"
Make this competitive so that the more times you have meetings that are walk and talk, the more you are 'winning'. Yet, the number of meetings will decline.

--------------

They now have a small unit that can measure your posture, etc and measures NEAT every 10 seconds.
Allows complex phenotyping of people moving, etc.

Ipod earpiece that detects activity level of the user - for each mile they walk, they get a free download. Kids get into the competition to get free downloads.

Imagine computers that are on treadmills (or exercise bikes), so you can stand and walk all day instead of sitting, People pick 1 mile an hour to work out, and burn 100 calories an hour.

If you design a school so kids can stand, they will move around a lot.

Now, there are Soda machines that say "Thirsty" - this is a cue to your brain to make you think about it, then purchase -also snack machines that say "hungry"

no perpetual motion machines

[magarity]

I guess you don't know much about genetics, do ya? :-)
 
It's a simple formula: calories in - calories burned = fat stored.
If calories in - calories burned = fat stored * magic_genetics_modifier then you've invented energy creation from nothing or destruction without release.
 
In either case, the genetics excuse for obesity is incompatible with the conservation of energy. The genetics track really means some people have faster metabolisms and burn the calories or don't have as efficient a gastro system to extract calories from food. Other people have slower metabolisms or more efficient gastro systems to get every bit out. People in the latter group need to eat a lot less and/or find a way to burn off more (exercise). Convincing people of formula #2 above is just more helpless victim mentality.

Re:Whatever, won't work where I am

[bwcarty]

Let's see, you have an elliptical machine and a bicycle, but don't have enough time to use them; however, you also have a Nintendo Wii, which you do seem to have time for, and you're considering a machine that works in conjuction with video games.

Sounds like video games are a higher priority than health for you. 30-60 minutes a day on the elliptical or bike a few times a week would be a good start. The weight won't disappear overnight, but over time, it will have some positive benefits.

There3 Greate!!!

[Temujin_12]

I'm cucreantly oon a traedmill worksttatioan and I mu8tgst say that6y I lovwe it. It makeeks lossigsn weight so easty. Ittsw a littlwe buumpy but I dootn' think anyoeonq2 nottices.

I built my own...

[HenryLollins]

I'm seeing a lot of BS flying around about the idea of a walking desk, and having built my own, I thought I should de-FUD the conversation a bit.

You're not running, or even walking quickly. James Levine, the guy spearheading all this NEAT stuff, recommends .7 mph, which is crazy slow. Slow enough, in fact, that its almost hard to walk at that speed. The point is to just move and burn a steady trickle of calories over a long period of time, not "work out". If you're sweating or even breathing hard at all, you're doing it wrong. I can talk on the phone and the other party has no idea that I'm on a treadmill. I personally vary my speed between 1.2 and 2.0 mph. Basically, the speed is inversely proportional to the amount of concentration required by the current task. If I'm just reading, I can do 2.0 with no problem. If I'm writing code or doing any real amount of typing, I'll usually keep it around 1.4 - 1.6.

Which brings me to an important point: typing speed is nearly unaffected. My error rate is probably a little higher when on the treadmill, but not enough to be an issue at all. I can still out-type nearly everyone on IM, so if the walking slows me down at all, it's a moot point anyway.

It took me a couple days to really adapt to it, but once you're used to walking and working simultaneously, it's pretty mindless. Your legs basically go on autopilot while your mind does what it needs to do. I would compare it to [car analogy alert!] driving a manual transmission in heavy city traffic. It sucks at first, but eventually it's all muscle memory and you don't have to think about it at all. You just do it.

Here are some (old, crappy) pics of the treadmill set up in my old office:
http://img476.imageshack.us/img476/7197/0918061209 ve8.jpg
http://img513.imageshack.us/img513/9194/0918061210 jr6.jpg
http://img513.imageshack.us/img513/898/0918061211l r5.jpg
http://img513.imageshack.us/img513/8043/0918061212 rk7.jpg
http://img513.imageshack.us/img513/6964/0918061214 wt9.jpg

It looks somewhat assy, but it works really, really well. The keyboard/mouse platform is ultra-stable and does not move at all or even vibrate at the speeds I walk. With the monitors positioned the way they are, my eyes never have trouble following even small text, and I'm older with very bad vision. If anyone is considering doing this, don't even bother with a treadmill that retails for less than about $1500. You need a high quality treadmill to achieve the necessary silence and stability for office use.