Personal Desk Treadle Exerciser/Power Generator – Part 1

Spending upwards of eight hours a day sitting at a desk working on the computer takes a toll on your body. So over the last few years I’ve been thinking about ways to work my legs to keep my blood moving and muscles active while sitting at my desk.

My first thought was to try a typical hand/ped ergometer like this one:

I found though that because of the cycling motion, my knees would rise too high and hit the bottom of my desk and even if I could avoid that, the gross movement of the legs would work my hip joints causing me to rock in my chair. Not very conducive to focusing,

So  rethinking it I decided that a more isolated pedal-based movement would be the way to go; no more knee hits and chair rocking.

I looked around to see what might be commercially available for this kind of thing but I didn’t find anything very appealing. Here are a couple of examples of related products that are marketed for what I was looking for:

My concern with these was that there was no real resistance to the pedal action and in turn would make the movements rather jerky which I’m pretty sure would turn most people off to these products after a bit of use.

I kept digging and I happened on the double bass drum pedal setup:

My friend Matt says that they’re popular among metalheads

But I thought it was perfect because it had a pedal for each foot, had resistance from the springs shown in the picture and was constructed of sturdy hardware.

I bought one from Amazon.

Right around this time I began thinking that if I’m going to be expending energy while I’m working at my desk, why not convert that energy to electricity? And that would add an additional motivation for using the pedals. I juice up my computer and monitors while I was at it. Hey, why not?

More to come in part 2!