The Desk Setup

The space under the desk is part of the setup

Almost every guide to setting up a desk describes the top of it. The part that most often ruins a setup is underneath, where a crossbar, a drawer pedestal, a tower or a heap of cables stops you getting the chair close enough to the desk.

That matters because it doesn’t stay a leg problem. If you can’t pull the chair in, the keyboard is further away than it should be, so you reach, so your shoulders come forward and your back leaves the chair. An obstruction under the desk shows up as tension in your shoulders, which is why nobody connects the two.

What the space is for

Three things, and it’s easy to only think of the first.

Room for your knees and thighs, without touching anything, while sitting fully back. Contact with an underside or a crossbar makes you sit further out or splay your legs.

Room for the chair to advance. This is the one people miss. Your knees might clear the desk fine while the chair — its front edge, its armrests, its base — hits something. The chair stops moving in and you stop moving in with it.

Room for your feet to move, and to be somewhere other than one spot. Nobody’s feet stay in one place for eight hours, and a footwell full of objects means the only available positions are the ones the objects allow.

UNDER-DESK CLEARANCE — the check
  Sit fully back, chair pulled as far in as it will go.

  · Knees, thighs and shins touching nothing        → clear
  · Something contacts your knees or thighs         → crossbar or
                                                      desk underside
  · Chair stops before you're close to the desk     → armrests or
                                                      chair base
  · Feet have one position and it's boxed in        → footwell
                                                      is storage
  Now: can you cross your legs, or stretch them out
  in front of you, without moving anything?

The last line is the real test, and most setups fail it. A footwell with exactly one usable position is a footwell that will make you fidget upward — into your hips and lower back — because your legs have nowhere to go.

The four usual obstructions

The crossbar. Many desks, especially flat-pack and trestle designs, have a horizontal bar between the legs at shin height, and it is placed for the desk’s rigidity rather than for your legs. If it’s at the front, you can’t get close. Sometimes it can be moved to the back leg holes; sometimes it can be removed entirely if the desk has other bracing, though it’s worth pushing on the corners hard before you decide the desk is stable without it. If neither works, the desk has a maximum closeness, and you’ll have to fix the reach at the keyboard instead.

The drawer pedestal. A drawer unit under one side eats half the footwell and — worse — forces an asymmetric sitting position: one knee straight ahead, one turned out. If you feel tired on one side only, this is a candidate, along with the mouse. Most pedestals are on castors and can go beside the desk instead of under it, at the cost of some reach.

The computer, and its cables. A tower in the footwell is a large object that must not be kicked, so you sit around it. Cables are worse in a specific way: they don’t block your legs, they tangle around them, so you learn to keep your feet still to avoid pulling something out. That is a self-imposed restriction on the only part of your body that could otherwise shift. Cable-tie the loose length up under the desk. This is a fifteen-minute job with a bag of ties and it makes a difference out of proportion to the effort.

The footrest doing double duty. If your chair is high enough that you need a box under your feet, the box has to be positioned so it doesn’t stop the chair coming in, and it has to be far enough forward that you can put your feet flat rather than at an angle. A footrest jammed against the back of the footwell puts your feet somewhere your legs don’t want them.

Clearing it, in order

  1. Empty the footwell completely. Everything out, including the things you’re sure are fine. Then sit down and pull in and see where the chair actually stops. You now know whether the problem is stored objects or built-in ones.
  2. Sort the cables before anything goes back. Tie the slack up, run it along the back edge, get the mains block off the floor if you can mount it to the underside of the desk.
  3. Put back only what has to be there. A tower has to be somewhere, but it does not have to be in the middle. Against the far side of the footwell, or beside the desk, or on the desk if it’s small.
  4. Then look at the built-in obstructions — crossbar, pedestal — with a screwdriver, because these are frequently movable and nobody tries.
  5. Recheck the chair. Once you can sit closer, your keyboard and mouse are now further away than they need to be, so pull them in. This is the step people skip, and skipping it means the clearing achieved nothing.

The armrest case, which surprises people

If the chair stops moving in and nothing is touching your legs, look at the armrests. Fixed armrests on a lot of chairs — task chairs and gaming chairs both — sit at a height that collides with the desk edge or the desk apron. The chair simply cannot advance past them.

The fix is either to lower them under the desk edge if they adjust, or to remove them if the chair permits it, which many do with four bolts. A chair whose armrests hold it half a hand’s width away from the desk is costing you that distance on every reach, all day. Armrests are usually set wrong anyway, and this is one of the reasons.

When the desk just won’t allow it

Some desks have a front crossbar you can’t move, or an apron so deep that no chair fits under it, or a fixed pedestal. If so, that desk has a fixed maximum closeness, and the setup has to be arranged around it: keyboard as far toward you as the desk edge allows, screen distance recovered by taking the monitor stand off rather than by moving anything forward.

If it’s an option, turning the desk around is worth a try. A desk with a front crossbar often has a clear back edge, and desks are frequently symmetrical enough that using them backwards works fine.

Clearing the footwell removes a reason to sit badly. It doesn’t treat anything, and no position is good for hours regardless of how much room your legs have — the freedom to shift is the point, not a substitute for getting up. Persistent pain, or numbness, tingling or weakness in the legs or feet, is a reason to see a clinician rather than to rearrange cables.

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