Building Limberly, Part 1: We're Not Moving Enough

The health tax of desk work

I've been a software developer for over ten years, and I've spent most of this time sitting. Being aware of the general idea that "sitting is bad for you," I was going to the gym three times per week to counter the negative effects.

Despite working out, I occasionally experienced neck pain, shoulder pain, back pain, and forearm aches. Luckily not all at once, but taking turns. Some of it was obvious, like a stiff neck after a long day, but some was sneakier. For instance, sitting for long durations disengages your glutes¹, which makes something else compensate, which makes something else hurt. Your butt forgets how to butt, and your back pays for it.

After checking online, I learned that plenty of people were paying the same kind of "health tax" while working sedentary jobs, and they were looking for solutions.

Problem: Sedentary work causes significant strain on our bodies.

Everyone is a snowflake

There's no such thing as a perfect textbook body. Everyone comes with their own quirks, myself included. After working with personal trainers, I learned that my body has a few limitations, such as a hip impingement² and "flat feet."³Both of these were possible to improve, but three gym sessions a week weren't it.

I needed to do certain exercises at home every day. Homework, yikes. Sometimes I'd do them before work, sometimes after, but never really consistently. It just wasn't on my mind, or I felt like I didn't have time for it.

As a result, I spent a long time working around these limitations at the gym rather than addressing them directly.

Problem: Some of us need to be doing specific movements daily but either forget or feel like we don't have the time.

Can't buy your way out of it

Spend any time on the subreddit /r/ergonomics, and you'll notice a pattern. People are trying to undo what sitting all day does to them via standing desks, lumbar supports, ergonomic keyboards, footrests, etc.

I brought up this topic with my personal trainer, who works in rehabilitation and ergonomics alongside a team of experts and sees the consequences of desk work every day. He mentioned that one hard problem here is that people pay for a solution but tend to skip the actual work. This is exactly what I've noticed in my online research. People buy an ergonomic chair, a standing desk, or an exercise program, but they don't actually move.

Eventually some of these people show up at my PT's studio, paying a lot of money to fix what their ergonomic equipment was supposed to prevent - and they still end up having to put in the work!

Problem: People tend to overly rely on ergonomic equipment to offset negative effects of desk work.

A few minutes at a time

I don't remember where I first heard about them, but I'd been vaguely aware of micro-breaks for a while. Those short pauses where you purposefully step away from what you're doing, which apparently helps you recalibrate and focus on your task.

At one point, I dug deeper into the research behind them, and I was surprised by what I found. I learned that my desk job comes with a 16% increased all-cause mortality risk⁴ and that the main way to counter it comes down to moving and taking regular breaks during work. For maximum effect, the breaks are supposed to include light activity, not just switching the work-related browser window to your personal one⁵. Even so, just taking breaks and stepping away from work is a good first step⁶.

I realized I could use these short breaks to do my daily "homework," which I had struggled to schedule into my workday before.

Idea: Perform my required daily movements during micro-breaks. This ensures I always do them, I stay more engaged with my work, and I work on my longevity at the same time.

The best posture is your next posture

The above research⁴ also revealed another interesting finding: alternating between sitting and not sitting at work was not associated with a significant increase in mortality compared to mostly not sitting. Essentially, it's not that you need to stand all day; you just need to not sit all day.

Ergonomics research backs this up too: one study tested a protocol of 20 minutes sitting, 8 minutes standing, and 2 minutes walking, and it beat every other configuration (including standing-only) for reducing discomfort and fatigue⁵.

Idea: While working, alternate between sitting and standing. If a walking pad is available, it's worth using that too.

The low-tech solution

After gathering my learnings, I wanted to apply them to optimize my workday. There are multiple moving parts that need to come together to achieve that. We have the focus/break cycle, the posture switch cycle, and keeping track of the required daily movements (the homework).

My first instinct was to use a pen and paper plus my phone's timer app (or even those analog pomodoro timers). I tried setting this up, and it felt like a chore. Especially since every new addition adds a new thing to manually manage. I also assume not everyone has the knowledge and discipline to set this up, so it's not something I could share with my friends and colleagues.

Idea: There should be an automated system that combines ergonomic best practices and guides users on what to do and when.

The high-tech solution

After discarding the low-tech idea, I looked into a more appropriate 21st-century-style solution. Specialized apps that position themselves as a solution to the "sitting problem" do exist, but after trying a bunch of them, I found they come with caveats.

Some had decent exercise libraries, nice animated or video instructions, and Apple Health integration, but the core experience felt like an afterthought. They displayed what to do, but not why or when. They came across as home workout apps with a focus timer feature. On top of that, the ones I tested felt janky, required an account just to get started, and locked basic functionality behind a subscription.

That's why I decided to create Limberly.

Finally, the plug

Limberly is a mobile app that keeps you moving throughout the workday. On top of a focus timer and break activity suggestions, it implements mods (as in modifiers): small tweaks that mix up your sessions, like alternating your posture between sitting and standing.

At the time of writing this, I've been daily-driving it for about three months, starting from when it was nothing more than a basic timer. It works offline, doesn't require an account, and has no subscriptions.

If you'd like to try it yourself, go to limberly.app and join the waitlist. The app is still not publicly available, but I'll invite you to the testing group.

I'm a big fan of being able to pay rent and eat food, so some features may end up behind a paywall, but Limberly will always have a free, no-nonsense core.

Next up

This is the first post in a series about building Limberly. Here we focused mostly on what ignited the idea behind the app, while the next one will go over the tech stack and the architecture.

Thanks for taking the time to read this. Now, go get a glass of water, and do a couple of air squats :)

Footnotes

1. Prolonged sitting tightens the hip flexors and lengthens the glutes, a phenomenon colloquially known as dead butt syndrome. Without glute support, the load shifts to the lower back, hips, and knees, and they start hurting. ↩

2. Femoroacetabular impingement is a condition where the shape of the hip joint causes the bones to pinch against each other during movement. For me, avoiding the resulting pain means squatting with toes pointed further out, reaching less depth, and replacing conventional deadlifts with the sumo variation. Hip impingement is a spectrum, and I'm working on making the most of the range I have. ↩

3. What I thought my whole life were "flat feet" turned out to be collapsed arches, a condition where the arch drops over time from weakened muscles and tendons. Unlike true flat feet (pes planus), collapsed arches can often be significantly improved with targeted exercise. I like how this video explains it. ↩

4. In 2024, a study of 481,688 workers, tracked over 13 years, found that "individuals who predominantly engaged in sitting at work exhibited a higher risk of mortality from all causes (16%) and cardiovascular disease (34%) compared with those who predominantly did not sit, even after adjusting for sex, age, education, smoking, drinking, and body mass index." It also found that individuals engaging in very high levels of leisure physical activity, 90 or more minutes per day, effectively eliminated the elevated mortality risk. ↩ ↩²

5. A paper from 2022 found that active breaks involving light-intensity movement, around 2 to 3 minutes every 30 minutes, reduced musculoskeletal discomfort and improved cardiometabolic markers without negatively impacting productivity. One of the reviewed studies, Kar & Hedge (2020), tested a sit-stand-walk protocol, which outperformed all other configurations. ↩ ↩²

6. A meta-analysis from 2022 found statistically significant effects of micro-breaks on boosting vigor and reducing fatigue. The authors conclude that "any type of decoupling activity" is effective for well-being. ↩