Moving your body, even a bit, has enormous benefits – again to almost all people towards reducing the probability and severity of almost all diseases. So can you imagine the benefit of moving your body for several hours per day in a natural environment, and including heavy load bearing and bits of extreme exertion?

These things are not speculative pieces of alternative medicine. They are known, easily and reproducibly tested, and proven to be the most effective things we can possibly do with our time.

So why, the actual fuck, are people still sitting inside, watching Netflix, driving to work, and then driving to the doctor’s office to get deeper and deeper analysis of a neverending series of exotic and mysterious and unsolvable problems with their physical and mental health?

Okay, okay, this got me to put the book on hold at the library.

Friends came for dinner. A public-interest lawyer, noticing I was bigger, asked what I’d been up to.

“I'm really into lifting weights right now,” I said. “Trying to get strong.”

The lawyer’s wife, a marathoner and family therapist, appeared startled, as if concerned about my emotional state. She looked me in the eye and said, “Why?”

I’ve been trying to motivate myself to join a gym lately. My goal is to get a six pack. I’m aware that this is typically accomplished through diet, but lifting weights would make me look well rounded, not malnourished.

This article spoke to me as someone who has identified as a marathoner for the past 10 years (and continues to do so). While I may secretly want to look like a professional wrestler, I also don’t need to gain 50 pounds of muscle.

Just like basically everything else in life, there is a spectrum between cardiovascularly fit yet scrawny, and strong beyond belief yet can’t run around the block.

Inventor William Cubitt subscribed to the “no pain, no gain” philosophy. His “Tread-Wheel,” which was described in the 1822 edition of Rules for the Government of Gaols, Houses of Correction, and Penitentiaries, was presented as a way for prisoners to put in an honest day’s labor. Prisoners used treadmills in groups, with up to two dozen convicts working a single machine, usually grinding grain or pumping water, sometimes for as long as eight hours at a stretch. They’d do so “by means of steps … the gang of prisoners ascend[ing] at one end … their combined weight acting upon every successive stepping board, precisely as a stream upon the float-boards of a water wheel.”

Given a treadmill workout and nothing, I sadly choose nothing all too often.

However, it is fantastic that we have the option, and I’m glad the technology is evolving to make treadmill runs feel more like “real” runs.

I do wish, however, I had one of those treadmill desks. I could see myself easily getting 30,000 steps a day if I had one of those bad boys.