The Coolest Pieces of Gear We Tested This Week

A year into the pandemic has crystalized that working from home is the new reality. While that can come with some isolation—it also provides a chance to work on your fitness away from prying eyes or a gym. Say you’ve already invested in a standing desk and have been using it to make sure your Apple Watch quits bugging you about getting up, but you want to take it to the next level.

That’s where you add in a treadmill to tuck in under that desk, like the Unsit we’ve been testing for a few months. With this beefy treadmill we’ve been clocking about 4-5 miles a day at a comfortable walking speed. Admittedly, if we weren’t WFH we might not be using a walking desk, because they can be distracting both to the ears and the eyes. But at home, we don’t have that concern. The walking belt is about 30 x 40 inches, so much shorter than a standard treadmill. That preserves floor space in your home office, but also gives you more room side to side to strut.

And this thing is solid: unlike a regular treadmill that’s designed for running, the gearing in the Unsit is engineering for high torque at lower speeds, from .3 to 2 miles per hour—which is where most people walk. There’s little chance of you burning this motor out, but it’s also not the best solution for running. At all.

A controller sits on top of the desk with a simple dial that lets you crank the speed or pause the machine. If you step off, it shuts off automatically. And all the data is stored by the Unsit app or funnels into your Apple Health app. When we’re just surfing the internet or answering casual emails, we’re cranking at close to 2 mph, but when we need to focus we tend to slow it down and sometimes pause it. The noise level, we’ve found, is never so high that it’s distracting to someone on the phone.—Max Fischer, Men’s Journal contributor

[$2,195; inmovement.com]

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