Lose Weight While Sitting at Your Desk

People with sedentary, desk bound jobs could be helped by portable pedaling exercise machine, says a new study. These exercise machines will help them to counter the effects of sedentary jobs, according to the researchers.

In this study 18 full-time workers were provided with a portable pedaling exercise machine that was specifically designed to be used while in a workstation. The participants had an average age of 40-years-old and were mostly women who were obese and spent much of the time sitting in the workstation.

All the participants used the pedaling machine for an average of 23 minutes of the day for about 12 days out of the total 20 working days in the study. The portable machine was connected to the computer which recorded the pedal speed, distance, and calories burned. Thus the participants could monitor their physical activity which ranged from an average of one-third of a mile to 13.5 miles per day. An average of 500 calories was burned in these activities.

The participants were asked to fill in a questionnaire after four weeks of using the portable machine. Most of them were ready to use the portable machine in the workstation, if provided by the employer. The results show that pedaling during work time does not affect the quality or productivity of the work. They also noted that even though the novelty of the machine drained off within a few days after introduction, the intensity of physical activity was maintained over the four-week period. In the report published in, British Journal of Sports Medicine, the researchers report that 23 minutes of physical activity over a period of four weeks could improve the health of people in desk bound jobs.