Just about everything in the modern work day happens in front of us, and often below our eye lines.
Think about looking down at your keyboard, your phone, or even a notepad.
All day long, our bodies are being pushed in the same direction - hunched over.
You’ve probably noticed that as people age their posture tends to worsen - they become hunched over. You never see an elderly person who is in a permanent state of being bent over backward, staring at the sky. To the extent their posture has degraded, it’s that they are bent forward, almost curling up.
It happens this way because while there is lots of encouragement from the environment to look down with your hands in front of you, there is very little to look up, with your hands above you. So over time, you get molded into the shape your environment calls for.
A standing desk helps a lot with this, at least at the hip joint. But still, you’re being pushed forward and down - curled - by every glance down at your keyboard or phone or notepad.
You need to add something to encourage you to look up, straighten out, put your hands over your head. You need to reverse the load in the chain of your body - get some traction on your spine - unload your tissues and joints.
You need to HANG!
It really is that simple.
All the normal desk work you’re doing is curling you up, with “tech neck”, tension in your upper back, and fatigue in your lower back.
So you need some input that’s pushing everything in the other direction - and hanging is the perfect thing.
We first put pull up bars above our own desks over a decade ago. I would never work without one again - it's that impactful.
Seriously, it feels SO GOOD to be able to reach up and really straighten out any time I have a free moment (or on video calls, as many colleagues will tell you!).
Over the years, we’ve thought of various ways to bring this solution to our users, but nothing felt right. A stand-alone pull up bar was ugly and clunky and always in the way - and often either unstable or colliding with the desk. A ceiling-mounted bar or rings required too much DIY skills and elbow grease, and wouldn’t work in rentals or most commercial buildings.
So we kind of forgot about turning this solution into a great product.
But then we started selling our own desks, and realized we could *build the pull-up bar right into the desk* (I know, it seems obvious).
And the result is really neat. It’s super stable, and looks surprisingly good.
But most importantly - it makes it easy to hang from something at your desk, giving you a chance to counteract all the forces that are curling you up day after day, week after week, year after year.
So you can just reach up whenever the mood strikes you, wrap your fingers around the bar, lift up your feet, and feel your weight pull out the tension in your back and shoulders (and a lot more good stuff too). You can even do pull-ups or chin-ups if you want.
Maybe you can be the grandparent with fantastic posture and no back pain.
And in the meantime, you can feel better while you’re at work, and after.