Desk treadmill makes Notre Dame employees healthier – WNDU-TV
It’s an invention that has office workers talking from coast to coast. After all, it’s hard to stop it from running through your mind. It’s called the Sit2Stand Treadmill Desk and it looks just like it sounds. The product’s been tested by doctors that say if you use the device forty hours a week, at one mile an hour, you could shed up to 57 pounds in a year alone.
Although they’re not looking to shed that much weight, two employees at Notre Dame are putting the new device to the test. Inside the reservation department at the Morris Inn, the $2,100 machine is used forty hours a week.
“If it’s a busy day and you’re answering phones and taking reservations, you’ll look down and you’ll see you’ve been on it for two hours,” Morris Inn front office manager Shannen McKaskle said.
McKaskle’s co-worker says she walks five miles each week, helping her burn nearly 600 calories every day.
“Sometimes at the end of the conversation sometimes I will ask people if they could tell I was on a treadmill. Every single time they said they didn’t know what I was talking about,” Morris Inn reservation sales representative Wendy Winovich said.
Company leaders say the product has been so successful because of rising health care costs. Therefore, employers have purchased these dynamic desks in hopes their workers will be healthier and health care premiums will go down. A recent health study supports this theory. The study followed more than 123,000 people for 14 years. Researchers discovered women who spent six hours a day sitting, had a 37 percent increased risk of dying from heart disease. Meanwhile, the research indicated men had a 17 percent risk of increased heart disease.
Production for the machine began in Fort Wayne, Ind. during the winter of 2009. Since then, company officials say sales have more than doubled. Hundreds have been sold across the nation to companies like General Electric and Microsoft.
“I have more energy in the afternoon. I usually felt tired around 2 p.m. before we had this desk. But now we both notice an increase in our energy level,” Winovich added.
If you’d like to look at the variety of desk treadmills, just click on the Big Red Bar.