Amazon.com: Customer Reviews: Deskbound: Standing Up to a Sitting World

Top positive review

17 people found this helpful

Expensive, but may actually be worth every penny

ByDeskJobJoggeron October 2, 2016

I do crossfit and Kelly has a pretty strong presence in the community. I honestly thought the book would be as useful as the similar books I had purchased and because it is geared for crossfit enthusiasts, would be overpriced just like everything in crossfit. I WAS WRONG. This book is great. First, let me tell you what it is not, it is not a simple book that will give you a handful of exercises to do every day so your neck and back pain disappear in a week. What this books does have... it has treatments to address specific problems. Even better, there are very detailed pictures that are high quality so you can see exactly what to do. Yes, no more strange stick figures that you are trying to figure out what part of their body corresponds to your body! Beyond that, there are explanations on the sensations you may feel while performing the movements and what that means about your anatomical problem. I did not get this book to learn about how bad sitting at a desk is for me, since my body was already shown me that with pain. However, it does address the causes of all your problems if you are interested in that. I got it for the treatments, which I like a lot. As an FYI, a lot of these exercises require accessories. If you do crossfit they are all at your box, and likely your house. If you do not do crossfit, you may have to shell out $30-$100 depending on how into this you want to get. However, the basic foam roller and lacrosse ball you can buy on amazon have uses far beyond this book (see Youtube)

Top critical review

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72 people found this helpful

Good content, hard to read low-contrast printing

Bydaddy_will_fix_iton September 14, 2016

Yes, only 3 stars. I'm reviewing the book as a whole, not just the content. I give the content a 5, the writing a 4, and the physical print quality a 2. Here's why...

Content is excellent. I've got the other books he wrote, they are very helpful and the amount of pain removed from my body makes it worth far more than I paid. About the only improvement I could suggest is more sketch overlays that indicate the area of focus, direction of motion, things like that. I sometimes have to re-read the text 4 or 5 times to try and figure out the motion implied in the photo or series of them. Sketch lines down the spine and arm or leg, little angle symbol or curved arrows help me to understand very well. I still give it a 5 because maybe I'm just a visual learner and need that kind of thing, maybe most people can just "get it" from the words.

The writing style just isn't for me. It's not bad, it's conversational, and I get why. This is not a textbook. (I think the content could be re-written as a most excellent one.) Repetition bugs me. I know I need to re-read things to understand. Seeing the same phrases written out over and again may help some people, but doesn't make understanding any easier for me. The foreshadowing is excessive, to me, in the beginning. I read the table of contents, I can kinda tell what's coming later. If I had a nickel every time I see the phrase "later in this book you will learn" I'd maybe have a free book. :) Ok, not really true, but read it enough times and it gets annoying. So, 2 pretty minor things that bug me personally and probably nobody else. I give it a 4, you may give it a 5, but this review is simply my opinion.

Now what I really don't like, (and the main reason for giving a 3-star overall), the print quality. Seriously, anybody that thinks light thin text on shiny paper is a good idea should not be publishing books. If the ink were a full black, the font a little thicker, or maybe just printed on regular paper it wouldn't be such a struggle. (And maybe it is a full black, but the shiny paper effect makes it look like a dim gray at best to me.) More light doesn't help since that just makes the shiny glow off the paper worse. The contrast is simply poor and I can't stand reading this book more than a few minutes at a time, which is really frustrating because the information is so valuable that I am compelled to suffer through it. It's really hard to read and I'm very disappointed about that. Even the orange-bownish text used on captions is substantial enough to be easier to read than the main text. The binding is nice, and overall it's a nice well-made book. I can't honestly go lower than a 2 on the quality because it is a quality product. There's a lot of good photos, and maybe that's the reason for the paper type. Let's say the physical book gets a 5, but the #$%^$ main text font gets a -1 million rating.

EDIT: I'm going to try and upload a picture showing what I'm talking about, and I apologize if my camera isn't the greatest. This is a bit of page 48 and 49. Most pages are like 48 with that thin font. For some strange reason the first page or 2 of each section is like page 49, and it's much easier to read even still having a little glare from the paper. Nearly every heading is low contrast gray-on-white, or medium blue on light blue, etc, when there's perfectly readable black and white (or at least higher contrast color choices) nearby. Due to these font and color design choices I am constantly tilting the book to try and reduce glare, or leaning in and squinting to make out some low-contrast text, and in the end the eye-strain makes me want to throw the book at the wall. Maybe the facebook-generation has no visual issues with everything being low-contrast, (and maybe they can see in the dark for all I know), but it really ruins what would otherwise be a great book for me.

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Showing 1-2 of 2 reviews(2 star, Verified Purchases). See all 156 reviews

Not what I was expecting

ByRobert Ryanon January 10, 2017

Format: HardcoverVerified Purchase

Given the title of the book, I expected a lot of information about the health problems associated with sitting and the solutions to them. The book contains that information, but probably less than half of it.

The rest of the book is full of exercise prescriptions that revolve around the use of a ball and rubbing techniques with it to mobilize tissue. Great. Maybe rubbing a ball up and down my neck, or my elbow etc. is good for my health. Perhaps. But it's not what I wanted to find out about, and it isn't going to help me deal with my office job. Sure, everything is connected, but the book really only serves to promote the author's general lifestyle/health views. I wanted specific information, and I got a pile of unrelated stuff instead.

The portion of the book that does reflect its title is fair enough. That is, the information is there. But the delivery is faulty. It's one of those books that tells you what it's going to tell you at far greater length than it spends on actually delivering the goods. It became very annoying to read again and again "We'll tell you how to do that on page 235," or "The details are on page 241."

As someone said in another review, it should really have been a twenty page PDF. Or they should rename the book with a more accurate title.