Oregon University. US: Treadmill desks can help overweight or obese office workers get out
of their chairs and get moving, but a 12-week study by an Oregon State
University researcher found that the increase in physical activity was
small and did not help workers meet public health guidelines for daily
exercise.
Introducing treadmill desks in the workplace also can pose logistical
challenges that may not make such a program feasible for companies,
said John M. Schuna, Jr., an assistant professor of exercise and sports science in the College of Public Health and Human Sciences at OSU.
In a small study of treadmill desk use by overweight and obese office
workers, Schuna and his colleagues found that workers who used the
desks increased their average number of daily steps by more than 1,000,
but did not record any significant weight loss or changes in Body Mass
Index after 12 weeks. The employees only used the treadmills about half
the time they were asked to, averaging one session and 45 minutes a day
on the machines, Schuna said.
“Treadmill desks aren’t an effective replacement for regular
exercise, and the benefits of the desks may not justify the cost and
other challenges that come with implementing them,” Schuna said.
His findings were published recently in the “Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine.”
Co-authors include Damon L. Swift of East Carolina University and
several researchers from the Pennington Biomedical Research Center in
Baton Rouge, Louisiana. The research was supported by Blue Cross and
Blue Shield of Louisiana.
Treadmill desks have been gaining popularity as a solution for
helping sedentary workers out of their desk chairs during the work day.
Schuna and his colleagues wanted to evaluate the effectiveness of such
desks in changing workers’ behavior.
“There’s been a societal shift to more sedentary work and we are not
making it up in our leisure time,” Schuna said. “We were trying to
identify ways we could increase physical activity and combat the decline
in occupational physical activity we’ve seen in the past 50 years.”
The study targeted overweight and obese office workers whose jobs at a
private health insurance company required continuous desk work. About
40 employees participated in the 12-week study, with half using the
treadmills and the other half serving as a control group for comparison.
While the participants who used treadmills did increase their daily
step counts, they tended, on average, to walk at about 1.8 miles an
hour, a speed that would generally be considered light intensity
physical activity. Public health guidelines suggest adults need 30
minutes of moderate to vigorous physical activity several days a week.
“This was not moderate-intensity exercise,” Schuna said. “One of the
challenges with the treadmill desk is that it needs to be
lower-intensity activity so employees can still perform their work
duties.”
There may be cardiovascular or other benefits when people begin
increasing their steps, even in small amounts at low intensity, but
reversing the effects of a sedentary lifestyle would likely require more
activity, including moderate or vigorous exercise, he said.
Researchers faced several challenges with the study, including
difficulty recruiting employees to participate. Initially, more than 700
employees of the company were targeted for recruitment, with roughly 10
percent of them expressing interest in participating. Some of those
employees were deemed ineligible for the study for a variety of reasons,
while others did not receive approval from a supervisor.
They also found work considerations often kept employees from using
the desks, even though the company had approved and encouraged employees
to participate in the program. Employees shared the treadmill desks,
which required scheduling the time they would be using them.
Schuna said the findings from this study indicate that future
research on exercise in the workplace should focus on interventions that
avoid some of the pitfalls that come with treadmill desks.
“We need to identify some form of physical activity that can be done simply and at a low cost in an office setting,” he said.