Walking desk, practicum
Adam Compton
June 13, 2026
I wanted to get a walking desk setup (variously also known as a
treadmill desk or treadmill workstation) so I could get a few more steps
in, especially as it's getting to be summertime here and I don't want
to go outside during the day if I can possibly avoid it.
I did a lot of research and went down a lot of dead ends, but I found
some kit that works for me and I wanted to share in case anybody else
was stuck in the same way.
tl; dr
The Eocnrhe treadmill desk and
the UREVO Spacewalk E1L walking
pad are a
fine combination; the walking pad can bear my weight, and the desk gets
high enough to put a laptop on at a comfortable height (even accounting
for the depth of the walking pad) and also tilts to settle the laptop at
an appropriate angle. These aren't the sturdiest or highest-quality
items, but they definitely get the job done, they work well together,
and they were an inexpensive way for me to get started with a walking
desk.
Criteria
I had some criteria for both the treadmill/walking pad and for the desk.
Treadmill:
- Must be able to support "enough" weight (I don't want to get
specific)
- Should be light enough to move out of the way at the end of the
workday
- No unnecessary bells and whistles; I'm not trying to go for a run
through the virtual countryside, I'm just trying to get in some
extra steps
Desk:
- Must be height-adjustable
- Must be able to reach a comfortable height, account both for how
tall I am and for the depth of the treadmill
- Should be light enough to move out of the way at the end of the
workday
- Should be about as narrow as the treadmill (I don't need a wide
desk and I'm not putting a monitor on it)
- Should not be electric; I won't be adjusting it often and if I do I
can do it by hand
Research
Treadmill
I started with Wirecutter; even though they were bought out a few years
ago, their product reviews are at least a good baseline for learning
about what's on the market. They have a best under-desk
treadmills
review which recommends the "Goplus 2 in 1" treadmill. That one is
~80 pounds (so way too heavy to easily move around) and has a running
mode (unnecessary bells and whistles). It was also pretty expensive for
an experiment.
After doing a ton of research I identified the UREVO line as a good
prospect. It was hard to map the product to the actual Amazon page
(they're all nothing but buzzwords and none of them have the actual
product name in them) but I eventually figured it out. They have several
products that I think would be perfectly suitable for my use case, but
the UREVO Spacewalk E1L walking
pad was
cromulent and pretty cheap so it got the nod.
Desk
The desk was, believe it or not, much harder to source. Almost
everything I found for walking desks assumed I wanted to have a proper
desk, with space for a whole workstation, and that I wanted to be able
to raise it to standing/walking or lower it to sitting. However, I have
a perfectly good desk already that I didn't want to replace for this
experiment, so I was looking for a laptop-only desk that was just about
as small as it could be.
After a ton of casting about, I found the Eocnrhe treadmill
desk, which seemed incredibly
sketchy but did actually arrive as advertised and did exactly what I
needed it to do. It's not the sturdiest thing, but it's plenty strong
enough to hold a laptop, and I'm not planning to lean on it anyhow.
Conclusion
Sourcing this equipment was way harder than I expected it to be. I found
lots of review sites that seemed to think that this experiment should
cost me hundreds or thousands of dollars to start, which I bounced off
[hard]{.underline}. There was also lots of conflicting advice, and
almost no manufacturer (neither desks nor treadmills) actually listed
all of the relevant information on their websites. Hopefully this saves
somebody some of the trouble I went through in figuring this all out.
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