There is no better known poison to skeleto-muscular health than the desk job: sedentary all day, probably slouching, knackering your neck by trying to type with a phone cradled in it, numbing your butt: it’s amazing any of us survive to retirement.

In recent years, people have begun to rave about the standing desk, which is much like a regular desk, except higher and much more expensive. The bike desk (full name FlexiSpot Deskcise Pro) is basically an exercise bike with a small desk big enough for a laptop. It will also function for standing (you pull forward the desk and ignore the saddle), but considering I won’t even remain on my feet to clean my teeth, there was no chance.

However, cycling while working seemed reasonable. I cycle anyway, and always thought of it as multitasking: travelling and also thinking. The bike has a display that you can toggle between calories burned, speed and distance. Those calorie counters are wildly inaccurate unless they also take your weight, and the distance seemed rather theoretical, given that I wasn’t moving – so I stuck with speed and cycled at about 22km an hour. For the first five minutes. It is impossible to concentrate at that velocity. I couldn’t even reply to the most basic emails about where I was and how long I’d be there.

Slowing to about 17km an hour, I was slightly more productive. I could read, but I still couldn’t type very systematically. As soon as I started concentrating, I would slow to nothing, and there’s something about that lackadaisical non-speed, going so slowly that on a regular bike you’d fall over, burning about as many calories as you do eating celery, that is demoralising. Pick up speed again, and I’d immediately forget what I was doing. It wasn’t so much like being at work as having a dream that you were at work: many visual signifiers of work (computers, other people working); very little actually produced.

Yet people are drawn towards you as if you’re flogging ice-cream on a hot day, and if you can get anything at all out of chatting (believe me, I can: chat is my uranium) it’s brilliant. Everyone wants a go, and the office comes alive with a toddler spirit of adventurousness cut with avarice (you’re holding a lorry; I want a lorry!). The bike desk’s slightly elevated aspect gives you a great view, so you can vape without your boss seeing. It does, for at least the times your legs are moving, make you sit up straight.

I did conclude, though, that physical and mental labour are mutually exclusive; that no actionable insight has ever occurred to me while cycling; and that the mental clarity that exercise is meant to bring occurs only some time after the event. Cramming every minute to the max with noble purpose is actually a bit fascistic, when you think about it. Probably, the way to use it is to alternate between working and cycling, which wouldn’t necessarily dent your output – not if you’re someone who spends a certain amount of the day staring out of a window.

What I learned

Trying to type while cycling is a bit like patting your head and rubbing your belly at the same time