According to the results of one study out of Canada, treadmill desks can actually make the user smarter and more efficient at their jobs.

In this day and age, we have plenty of reasons to be lazy. Between Netflix and YouTube, we don’t have to leave the sofa for hours or even go to the movie theatre to catch a good film. Thanks to voice activated controls on some of the latest TVs, we don’t have to lift our hands to reach the TV remote either. And that’s why so many people are constantly looking for ways to encourage themselves to keep fit and keep moving, when every bit of gadgetry in our homes and places of work is telling us to do otherwise. That’s why there’s so much interest around wearables like FitBit and the Apple Watch.

One slightly less mobile (and sometimes more expensive) device that people have been using to keep fit is the treadmill desk. Unlike your ordinary desk which you sit at until your bottom has gone numb, the treadmill desk encourages you to go for a light jog or a brisk walk as you go about your day to day. And, according to one study, using treadmill desks can even make you smarter.

The study, published in Computers In Human Behavior, took 18 students from Montreal and made nine of them read some text and answer some emails while the other nine did the same whilst using a treadmill desk. After 10 minutes, the groups of students were then given a break and were hooked up to an EEG machine (EEG machines record brain activity) before being asked true or false questions about the text and emails that they read.

According to the results, the group who used a treadmill desk were 34.9% more likely to answer questions correctly than the group that did it whilst sitting down. Those who used the desks also added that they felt that they paid more attention to what they were doing, whilst the EEG backed that up, confirming that their brain activity showed better signs memory retention.

So can we take this study as the gospel? And is this a good enough reason to go out and buy a treadmill desk of your own? Well, not really. One of the flaws of the survey is that they didn’t figure out just how well the participants were able to remember things before they took part in the study and they may have just picked a batch of attentive people. Furthermore, just 18 participants were used which is an incredibly small sample of people to conduct this test on. Alas, there are still plenty of health benefits so that remains a good reason to buy one.

Source: Computers In Human Behavior

Be social! Follow Walyou on Facebook and Twitter, and read more related stories, Wokamon Is the Modern-Day Equivalent of Tamagotchi for Fitness, Withings Activité Packs Fitness Tracking in the Body of a Classic Watch