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Assuming a standard office layout, there are a few things you can do to tweak your fitness quotient a bit, but it's mostly through harm reduction rather than positive benefits. Don't smoke, avoid junk food, stand and walk around. Consider a standing desk, use stairs, manage your stress, work sensible hours, walk somewhere for lunch. Incorporate walking in your commute, consider moving to where a healthier lifestyle is a matter of course, not a decision to be made daily.

But the realities of human physiological response to training stimulus means that intensity matters, and you're simply not going to reach appropriate levels of stimulation at the office without radically changing your workspace and creating a considerable distraction and disruption for those around you.

The good news is that an effective workout can be packed into a short time -- 20 - 60 minutes -- and a few workouts a week can make a significant difference in health and appearance. The biggest hurdle for most people is sorting out good information from bad on diet, exercise, and lifestyle. Pointers I like to put in front of folks include Liam Rosen's "Beginners' Health & Fitness Guide, the Reddit Fitness FAQ, and books such as The New Rules of Lifting. A healthy diet and a solid 8 hours of nightly sleep are your foundation. A good a strength training routine, and HIIT cardio can fit inside a 20-60 minute workout period.

The best tools are relatively simple: a barbell, plates, rack stand or power cage, and a basic piece of cardio: your body, a barbell, kettlebells, a jump rope, a rowing machine (and if you're going to row, that's among the best technique videos out there).

That said, few offices are optimized for deadlifts, kettlebell swings, Oly lifting, or Tabata erging sessions. Whether you build it or buy it, a gym is a worthwhile investment. Consider it a workshop for improving and sustaining your body.

If you live in an area where a good gym is that far away, you likely have enough space that you can create a decent workout space in your own home.

It's also highly likely that you're overlooking other options: high schools, community colleges, YMCAs, and various athletic clubs offer inexpensive access to cardio and strength equipment.

Note that "gym" and "fitness" don't consist simply of cardio. Strength training is highly underrated by much of the lay public.

A power cage, or even a set of bar stands, an Olympic barbell, and a few hundred pounds of plates will do you a lot of good. It's a bit of an investment, but it pays off in large dividends.

For cardio, a four-minute workout can be highly effective.

I'm 55 and I had some cognitive issues for a couple of years. This is what I've found:

Get off of cholesterol meds! Death is better than being stupid. Satins are the worst. I lost one job after a year when I was on 10mg of Lipitor. It got to the point that I was beginning to wonder if I would have to give up driving because I was having trouble concentrating well enough to drive safely (i.e. stay in my own lane on the freeway). You can imagine what meetings at work were like for me. I was just about to go see my doctor for what I was sure would be a brain tumor, when I asked myself: what's changed? I skipped my meds for a day and felt better. After a couple of weeks, I took another pill and felt much worse, so I stopped for good. It took about 2 to 3 years for me to recover.

The "mental fog" is not a generally recognized side effect of statins, though it is one of the most common statin side effects reported to the UCSD Statin Effects Study https://www.statineffects.com/info/. So, your doctor may have heard of it but the reports are anecdotal, not published. The UCSD study did one test where they tried to detect mental decline with statins but that study did not detect any. There is, however, at least one study that associated low cholesterol with cognitive issues.

The statins work by suppressing the mevalonate pathway in your liver. Mevalonate is a precursor to cholesterol and a whole bunch of other important stuff. One of the key things in "other stuff" is CoQ10. I now take 100mg of CoQ10 every 3 days or so. I feel as mentally sharp as I was in my 30s.

After I stopped the Lipitor, my doctor put my on Vytorin. Vytorin works differently than a statin. Vytorin inhibits cholesterol absorption in your intestines. I found the effect of Vytorin to be much milder than Lipitor but still too much to live with without a really clear payoff to taking it. Going from 2 chances in 10 of a heart attack to 1 chance in 10 isn't worth it to me. YMMV. During that time I was taking Vytorin, I didn't do well at another job, not badly enough to get fired, just bad enough that I didn't feel like I was making a contribution. If you miss the "make a good impression" window when you start a new job, it's really hard to recover.

After reading some of the posts in the Yahoo Stopped_Our_Statins group http://health.groups.yahoo.com/group/Stopped_Our_Statins, I feel lucky to have recovered at all.

At the risk of sounding totally arrogant, I'll say that the one good thing about that experience is that I understand people of average and below average intelligence better. :-) The world is a different place for them and they need to cope differently.

Other medications can cause mental problems too but I don't have any experience with them.

B vitamin supplements can help a lot too, especially if you drink or are under a lot of stress. I take two B-50s every day.

Exercise and sleep It helps keep your weight down and your energy level up. I find that exercise helps me sleep better which helps me think more clearly. Exercise is a challenge because I just don't recover as fast as I used to. If I worked out now as intensely as I did 15 years ago, I'd be a basket case for 6 months! My muscles recover from workouts well, the problem is tendons, ligaments, and joints. They take forever to heal. Check out Clarence Bass http://cbass.com/ to get an idea of what is possible. He only works out twice a week! A lot of 20-somethings would love to look as good as he does. There's a lot of good info on his site too.

I do Yoga, weightlifting, backpack (Scoutmaster for a local troop - talk about an interesting set of problems!), and some high-intensity cardio; I've had too many overuse injuries with long-slow-cardio. I've not been able to lift he

Hindu push-ups, Hindu squats, back bridge. For more information: http://cbass.com/Furey.htm [cbass.com].

That was not the kama sutra link I was looking for...

Hindu push-ups, Hindu squats, back bridge. For more information: http://cbass.com/Furey.htm.

For an example of how fit you can stay well into later life: Clarence Bass. This guy is still in phenomenal shape at 65 years of age.

That's precisely why it is so important when you do start working out to keep a training journal. If you don't keep track of your progress, then it is very likely that you won't make any progress. It's very easy to simply do the same thing all the time and never push your body enough to force it to adapt. In fact, the only thing easier than staying at the same fitness level is to do nothing and become increasingly unfit. Not everyone responds to the same training modalities, and 50 minutes of cardio at 75% of your original max power output is precisely the sort of exercise regime that's basically guaranteed to fail for some people. If you start with a low enough maximum power output then your body has to adapt very little to maintain longer and longer bouts of 75% of that power output.

Part of the problem is that most people think that hamstering away mindlessly for hours on some sort of treadmill or exercise bike is the answer to fitness, and that's not really the case. If steady-state aerobics isn't making progress for you (or if you find it to be boring, like I do), then you need to try something like the Tabata Protocol or you need to mix in some resistance training to increase your max power output. Simply adding more hamstering to the equation isn't going to solve the problem.

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