Flexispot E7 Plus Review: Recovering From Injury With A Standing Desk

I would venture to suggest that a new piece of office furniture does not sound particularly "game changing" for the Digital Foundry audience in the same way that a new console or GPU architecture might, but I can say without exaggeration that the Flexispot E7 Plus desk is helping me on my journey to becoming healthier and to live a pain-free existence. So why is a motorised standing desk so important for me? Well, this is a review of a desk, but it's also the story of how playing games and working a deskbound job has caused serious damage - and how I'm going to need to rethink work and hobbies as I recover. And where I do those things is pretty important.

I have sat at a desk to play PC games and do office work for decades. Small desks, large desks, different chairs, but invariably with poor posture. For a younger person, this may not be especially problematic (in the short term at least) but I'm 35 now and not nearly as active as I used to be. In November 2025, my poor decisions finally caught up with me in the most mundane manner possible. Just by bending down to take a plate out of the dishwasher, my back seized up. All of sudden, sitting is painful, walking can be challenging or just impossible.

After a flurry of confused denial laced with pain, I learned almost two months later via an MRI that I have a lumbar disc protrusion (L4/L5 for the spinal column nerds out there). Years of bad posture and a lack of proper core muscle training means that this little bit of disc is poking the nerves in my lower spinal canal sending errant pain signals to my brain. The doctors and physical therapists make it clear to me: I need to change my life - and my work life - to heal so that I can live pain-free in the future.

My first stop on that journey to address my work life was to get a desk which allows me to choose how I want to work: sitting or standing. In the medium term it has to be a genuinely great standing desk as sitting right now just does not work without a lot of pain. For someone with office computer work, I imagine a standing desk only needs some basic requirements, but for me I needed a desk which fulfills the space and hardware requirements of being Digital Foundry's PC guy. So, when given the choice, I specifically sought out the Flexispot E7 Plus for many reasons, and so far, it's hitting all the marks that I wanted of it.

The desk needed to be a spacious replacement for my previous desk, occupying roughly the same amount of space in the room and offering a similar amount of desktop space. My previous sitting desk was fully stationary, but big and tough. It is 90x190cm, thick on the rim with a stabilising steel bar, but stable like a rock with a gorgeous hardwood surface made from an old barn door (a friend's father is a carpenter and furniture maker).

To cover a similar aesthetic and to deliver the functional usage I now need, I chose the 80x190cm Bamboo desktop surface as offered by Flexispot for the e7 series. It has roughly the same colour and wooden surface but I lost 10cm of desk depth. Thankfully, this wasn't an issue. As you can see from my original desk image, I did not even use the 10cm advantage in any way - the retro PCs and peripherals parked on top were leaving much space at the back, even more than 10cm.

The bamboo desktop surface it is being replaced with is thinner, as it no longer has a structural support bar on its edge like the previous desk did. That being the case, I can now easily leverage desktop side clamps for armature lights, microphones, cameras and VESA monitor arms (where I currently have an Ergotron LX on backorder). With the E7 I now have less dead space - and that space that I had was more multifunctional thanks to being thinner.

Another consideration in choosing the desk was how much weight it could bear. I had over 100kg of equipment on my previous stationary sitting desk, with much of the weight taken up in a lopsided arrangement where lightweight modern objects were on the left half and the heavy-duty retro steel cases and CRT were on the right. I was going to continue this set up style so I made a purposeful decision – I opted for the Flexispot E7 Plus instead of the E7 Pro.

The E7 Plus has four, thinner spaced-out stabilising motorised table legs instead of two thicker ones. It aesthetically resembles a classic desk and importantly its four-legged design can support 20kg more max weight on the desktop surface (200kg vs 180kg of the "pro" model).

With the E7 Plus, my desktop equipment arrangement is still under the max 200kg limit, which offers me great room for increasing weight on the desktop if need be. I am lucky enough to own a 21-inch ADI Microscan CRT which weighs 30kg and I will move it onto the desk in the future in place of the comparatively diminutive Gateway 2000 Vivitron 15 I have right now.

With the weight and dimensions checked off, the E7 Plus was ordered and delivered in less than a week's time with the legs coming separately than the desktop surface. Assembly was straightforward but definitely requires some common sense and preparation. For one, I do not recommend using traditional hand screwdrivers to assemble the desk. It is possible, but it would be arduous at certain points where you have to screw lengthy screws into the bottom of the wooden desktop surface.

If you're thinking of purchasing the E7, you ought to make sure you have an electric screwdriver that has a modular top with support for longer screw bits. If the screw bit is shorter on an electric screw driver, a number of the screws required for assembly will be hard to drill in as they are flush on stabilising metal pieces that might get in the way.

So, get an electric screwdriver and make sure that its screw/drill bits are of a good length (over 6cm if possible). Another aspect of preparation is room space. You need to factor in that the unassembled desk takes up nearly nearly twice the space on the floor, so plan accordingly.

While assembling I recommend following the pictures on the instructions as much as the written text. The technical diagrams have 1:1 orientations and can clue you in easily as to how things need to look. In a two-person team we took about 3.5 hours to assemble the desk, where we spent roughly an hour of that time double-checking our work. We are not experienced builders so I think it would go much quicker if you have assembled such furniture before and are more sure in your handiwork.

In building the desk we were grateful for the good part labelling and the relatively few parts that require user assembly. The only real snag we had during assembly came around step five where you connect the table legs with the bottom bar that eventually rests on the ground. Initially, as we tried to screw this bottom bar onto the legs, the pre-fashioned screw holes it had did not line up with corresponding holes on the table legs: the reason being was that the legs were already too tightly screwed into the support beams that house the motor.

The solution was to loosen the screws from steps one, two and four a touch to make the bottom bar align with its pre-ordained screw holes. I think this simple snag could have been avoided if those steps communicated that the screws do not need to be 100 percent screwed in, rather 95 percent screwed in to allow adjustment/wiggle room for alignment in step five. Still we managed to figure it out and the desk was soon up and running and connected to an outlet.

Since assembling the desk I have had two weeks with it and have figured out a lot about how I want to use it and how to achieve best comfort. Firstly, I discovered that different standing activities require different desk heights. If I am typing scripts, editing a video in Adobe Premiere or playing a game the desk, I set the desk to 115cm; If I am recording a DF Direct segment, I set the desk to 107cm, so that the camera has an obstructed view of my face without the monitor getting in the way.

Meanwhile, if I am painting a Warhammer figure after work on the weekend, the desk is at 122cm so I can rest my hands on it while having the figure as close to my face as possible, without requiring me to slouch or crane my neck to get that macro view of my painting. Here the E7 makes adjustments easy with its control panel where I have saved the various positions in its memory bank: but even if I did not use that feature, holding the down or up button is simple and fast. As the desk is moving up and down it is not loud and the desk remains perfectly stabilised with no wobbling or vibration in spite of the heavy equipment I have on it.

Another learning I had from my first two weeks with the desk is that standing work means having a good surface to stand on that is healthy for your feet and legs. I have been wearing cushy trainers with thick gummy heels on top of a thicker foam yoga mat, but if you do not have such things lying around, you can purchase ergonomic standing mats.

I also learned that you need to shift positions while standing and working. A physical therapist would say the same, but it is unhealthy and potentially uncomfortable to be in any one position all day long, standing or sitting. So if you are using a standing desk, you should periodically shift weight between legs, mobilise your hips occasionally and take breaks to move around and stretch yourself out. This is important for me with my back injury, but it is really important for anyone working a desk-based job while sitting or standing.

My last takeaway from using the E7 Plus for two weeks is that a work desk can be optimised over time as you get into the groove of using it. Right now, I am snaking the power cables from the back of the desk to power strips on the floor. It works, but it would be nice for the back of the desk to be tidier. To remedy that I will be grabbing some cable management rails to mount some power strips and other extraneous stationary cable devices (a KVM, for example). With one or two of those installed on the underside of the desk I would have a much cleaner and organised cable management set-up than I have ever had before.

I also am looking to add more armatures to its sides and back for lamps. At the moment I am utilising old soft-boxes on separate stands and having even more stuff on armatures would free up valuable room space. I am sure in time over the next few months I will be learning even more about using the new desk and I'll be sure to keep you updated via our various channels. How does the table hold up over time? How am I cleaning the bamboo surface? Perhaps most importantly, how is my back healing and what is it like to work while standing over time?

Please note that some external links on this page are affiliate links, which means if you click them and make a purchase we may receive a small percentage of the sale. Please read our FTC Disclosure for more information.