Office Fitness, is there such a thing?

Sometimes I get asked to write a piece on a topic that I struggle with, it’s not that I struggle with what to write it’s more the the topic itself. Recently I got asked to write about one of those topics, office fitness. 

Why would I struggle to write about office fitness? I don’t think 99% of people who work in offices would ever do exercise within the working environment. To me there is nothing worse than seeing a youtube clip of a trainer showing you how you can use you office desk as a tool for a great workout. Sure, some people may sometimes get a few tricep dips in at lunch time but I can’t ever see a workplace where people stop at 10am and everyone does max press ups off the printer. 

Maybe I need to define what office fitness is in a different way? When we think of the physical self and look at how office spaces are designed we see that there are going to be big problems for the body long term due to the what the objective of office design is: to make you productive at working for long periods of time. Maybe the better definition of office fitness could be: How to protect your body from the pitfalls of office design. 

This question leads us down a path where we look at habits that are causing damage to our body in the office. An example would be sitting with bad posture for long periods of time. This is a massive problem for so many people, ask any physio about how much damage this is doing to peoples backs. 

If you recognise that sitting with bad posture for long periods can create major problems for your back you can try to create change to avoid this. You could ask your employer to invest in a posture friendly quality chair that helps with your position, put a ‘posture sticker’ on your computer screen that would remind you to brace your core every time you see it, set alarms on your phone every hour that reminds you to get out of your seat to walk around for a minute or so to move. 

This is only one example of many that could help you look after your body more in an environment that is working against it. Take the time to have a look at what your workplace is doing to your body and implement a plan that protects it. Your body will thank you for it. 

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Episode 17 Fitness Behavior - What are you saying to yourself

In this months show I touch on the subject of negative self talk and how this can have a massive influence on how we experience the world. Then I talk about how we can change it. 

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It's simple math

Why is it that at this time of the year it is so hard to keep good behaviors around food, alcohol? It’s like the calendar flips over to December and for the next two months you become a different person. You can see yourself doing it but for some reason you can’t stop the tide of temptation and you get thrown out the other side, in late January in a place that you aren’t happy with; unfit, overweight and vowing to drink less.

To me it’s almost like a simple maths equation, let me explain. In a normal month during the year you may go out with friends every couple of weeks, have drinks after a weekly game of sport and once a month there’ll be a big occasion. In these social activities you may sometimes go a little too far with your eating and drinking but it doesn’t happen often so it doesn’t have a negative impact on you. If we go to my equation we would say that you had seven social ‘temptation’ occasions per month.

When December comes around the social calendar seems to multiplied, all of a sudden you are going out four nights a week for events where the temptation is higher because they are all about celebrating and someone else is paying! Now instead of going out seven times a month you are going out sixteen times and if anything the social occasions have a higher temptation rating. No wonder it’s a losing battle that you wake up from a couple months later wondering how you had ‘let yourself go’.

I know that the numbers I have used here probably won’t fit for everyone but you get my drift. The good thing about the “normal month”  is that we only expose ourselves to a certain amount of temptation, at this time of year our exposure increases rapidly. So what can we do to avoid the January blues?

If you are really motivated to get to January in a healthier state, spend time and consciously choose your social temptation times. This doesn’t mean that you can’t be social, it’s just try to choose the times when you will let you hair down and the times when you will have a quiet one and leave early. By doing this wisely you may find that January blues have become a thing of the past.

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