Aaron Landry

I’ve been frustrated a bit with spending most of my workday sitting. About a year ago I ordered a Magnetrainer exercise bike off of Amazon so I could bike at work. Coworker Nick helped me raise my desk, I lowered my chair adjusted how my laptop sat to use it. It certainly wasn’t a perfect solution: my posture wasn’t great and it was sometimes difficult to type while cycling. It lasted about a week and then it sat under my desk for a couple months until I brought it home. I now use it at home about once every couple weeks.

Last Wednesday, I was at lunch with coworkers Nick and Ian and we got talking about exercising at work in regards to a “Problem / Solution” project where we are tasked with tackling any problem we want and in our free time at work designing a proposed, theoretical or actual solution for it. We talked about some of the reports in the last decade about the pros and cons of using a treadmill built into a workstation. We saw some commercial solutions that were upwards of $4,000 and decided to drive to a used exercise equipment store to see what the possibilities were to modify a treadmill to work with our existing workstation setup at the office. I didn’t realize how expensive even used treadmills were and I was also amazed with how the consoles on all of them dominated the area in front of the person using it (aren’t there thousands of other people thinking the same thing we are?).

Strangely, that evening I was talking with a friend who was trying to help get rid of a treadmill. I figured if I could get it cheap enough, I wouldn’t mind taking it apart for this project. Sure enough, that evening we decided to bring it over to my office in the middle of the night and I paid him $100. The next morning I go up to coworker Nick and say, “hey, guess what I got in the back room?”

Nick, Ian and I spent that Thursday at lunch secretly building our workstation-treadmill. With removing only four bolts we were able to get the top bars and console off. We eventually used small tables to extend the height of the main desk. We positioned the controls so the safety key still works properly. It makes a bit of noise, as most treadmills do, but we’ve compensated by adding some spare speakers we had in the office for music. For the three of us, it was literally only about an hour to complete. I think it looks pretty decent.

After we presented it to the rest of the company a few people wanted to sign up for shifts to use it! I am going to try to spend a few hours every day on it and see how it goes for a month.