Can Junking Your Office Chair Help You Lose Weight?

We weren’t really designed to sit for long periods, which probably explains why so many people find sitting all day in an office chair so uncomfortable.

Although the vast improvement in office chair design over recent years has made it possible to achieve good working comfort when you invest in a good chair, weight gain is still a problem for some.

This is due to the problem of sitting all day and the lack of exercise can tend to pile on the pounds and after a long day’s work we don’t always feel particularly inclined to go to the gym and workout.

Dr James Levine of the Mayo Clinic was well aware of this problem and how the simple action of walking can help to keep weight down by burning off unwanted calories – the problem remained how could this be incorporated into the office workers’ daily routine?

Well the answer was a tread mill designed to run in slow motion, and following a meeting with leading furniture manufacturer Steelcase they agreed to design one and the Walkstation came into being.

Users literally walk their way through their work at a fairly leisurely 1 – 2 miles per hour and this activity uses enough energy to burn of excess calories and keep weight in check.

There are inevitably some serious drawbacks with the Walkstation the main one being the cost, which at a typical price of $5000 per station is likely to challenge all but the wealthiest of businesses in these recessionary times.

The other potential constraint is how the Walkstation would fit into existing office layouts, I can’t quite imagine rows and rows of them, or 4 person workstation clusters somehow. And even though they only run at low speed some hapless employee would likely injure themselves.

So what do you think, would you use one if you had the chance, please comment below?