Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

I'm not much of an athlete so keeping up on physical activity usually means having to hit the gym to work out--something I find boring and unengaging. On top of that, I work in an office at a desk and my hobbies generally involve sitting as well. So I am in serious need of a physical activity that engages me with a huge bonus to any activity that I can incorporate into the things I'm already doing. Enter the Whirly Board. After a solid 3+ hours of scouring Amazon for balance boards, I came to the conclusion that this one was the right choice. And after spending about a week with mine at my standing desk, I can advise that this is the best choice for me by a wide margin. I'm making solid improvements to my balance and core engagement day over day. This will have a positive impact on my posture and will ultimately help me address my lower back issues by retraining my abdominals and obliques to hold me up instead of my glutes doing all the work all the time. Balance boards on Amazon seem to fall into only a couple of categories: 1.) Round or rectangular wooden boards with coarse grip tape on top and some kind of semi-rigid ball or cylinder on the underside. These are aimed squarely at the gym crowd and the elderly. They don't seem to come in varieties larger than 16 inches in diameter or roughly 16 inches in width. They look very nice for their simplicity but with no grip tape options and their relatively small size make them difficult to recommend for an adult male who would ideally have their feet at least shoulder width apart or wider to accommodate a lower center of gravity. 2.) Longboards made of any number of materials (plastic, wood, etc.) with softer grip tape on the top and a separate cylinder on the underside. Sometimes there's a rail system underneath to help the cylinder stay in place, some of the older products in the space feature a fully separate cylinder with no rail system. The boards themselves are longer, like a skateboard, than the kinds mentioned above. Within this category, you'll see that they are either aimed at office workers as standing desk accessories or they'll be aimed at the outdoorsy types as an activity akin to, say, slacklining. The smaller round and rectangular types are cost-effective, usually hovering somewhere around $25-$60 (sometimes more) and they all appear to be essentially the same thing. It's quite possible that they are all manufactured by the same company and are sold with different branding--that's how similar they all look to one another. And they seem fine but the small size isn't so much meant for two feet planted on the board activities. It seems like they're especially well-suited for lunges and single appendage kinds of workouts. But they aren't going to get you much mileage otherwise. And while they all appear to be made from plywood, I can't say that I necessarily trust the build quality sight unseen. The latter category of longboards ranges in price from upwards of $100 to beyond $200. Again, they are being marketed at office workers a ton and I think there's some price gouging here predicated on the notion that companies will pay the premium. Many of these office-focused boards use mixed materials--seemingly lots of plastics, and generally look about as office-friendly as you'd expect--lots of black and gray, boring. The boards that focus on the more outdoorsy type are similarly priced and tend to look the part as well--more colors are available, more designs, but maybe not in keeping with most people's office decor. As mentioned, these boards tend to feature a free cylinder that you have to balance on. The cylinder means you don't have to worry so much about your forward/backward balance but the ones that don't feature a rail system are terrifying for those of us who don't have excellent balance already because the board can shoot out to either side if and when you lose your balance. I've tried these kinds of boards in the past and nearly hurt myself. They're absolutely great for anyone that already has good to great balance but they are too challenging for those of us just getting started. And it's all of those factors that ultimately played into my decision to buy a Whirly Board. Overall design, price, and relative difficulty. The Whirly Board nails it in every one of those categories. I work in an office all day long and when I get home I play PC games or draw at my desk. Sitting all day and all night is no good for my back--I now have somewhat frequent issues with lower back spasms. To stymie the effects of a sedentary lifestyle, I bought a standing desk and a nice mat to go with it and that really changed things for the better for me. It's made a huge improvement to my quality of life. I wanted to kick things up a notch now that I'm standing more often and I wanted something versatile, something that looks good, something that is challenging without being dangerous, something that will really test my balance and get me to engage my super-weak core muscles. The Whirly Board checks all of those boxes. It's a pretty straightforward skateboard design. The laminated plywood board is solid. I am roughly 200 lbs and the board does not flex or bow under my weight. I have no doubt that this board will last me a lifetime if I treat it well. The cork grip is very nice on bare feet. And the natural finish is quite nice. The colored dome on the underside comes in a few different colors that you'll likely not see often but it's great that they put so much care into how the board looks from all angles. The fixed design of the rigid domes on the underside of the board provide me with a solid challenge while also maintaining a certain amount of predictability and user-friendliness. The fixed elements down there mean that I don't have to focus so squarely on just balancing, it is not a complete activity unto itself. In fact, the Whirly Board invites you to get comfortable quickly so that you can start doing more interesting things on the board--spins, walks, squats, etc. Overall this thing is very well-designed, it's clearly been well thought out from top to bottom. And it does more than just help you balance! Check out their website and watch their videos that go into greater detail on how you can use the Whirly Board to help you wakeboard train, snowboard train, etc. etc. At this price point, the Whirly Board does everything that it's competitors do at easily $70 less than some of the more expensive products out there and with more versatility and higher build quality than the enticingly cheap products out there. If you are like me and spend a lot of time at a desk (for fun or otherwise) and you want to mix it up with some physical exertion and training, this is a great choice. This is definitely the best balance board to get for a standing desk since it can be used away from the standing desk for more than just balancing if you want it to. It looks the best out of the humdrum options out there, too. You just can't go wrong with this one.