Slashdot Mirror
Ask Slashdot: How Do You Stay Fit At Work?
Dishwasha writes "What do you do to stay fit? Probably like many of you, this code monkey has lead a fairly sedentary life consisting most on fritos, tab, and mountain dew. Every time I attempt to incorporate exercise in even the most modest amount it never really seems to work out. 'Just do it' or joining and going to a gym just doesn't seem to work and with time being my most precious resource at this point, I would like to incorporate exercise in to my daily work process. Our office recently switched to standing desks, which is great, and I would like to possibly bring in a flat treadmill that fits under the standing desk, but my bosses have balked unless the equipment is whisper silent. We are a small business in a traditional office park with no exercise facility. Do any other geeks out there have a similar set up and would like to share what they use to stay heart healthy and improve circulation during their work day? What other ways do you incorporate exercise in to your geeky or nerdy lifestyle?"
What the poster meant was that he's just too lazy to go to the gym when he could be at home watching TV. Any significant workout is going to make you sweat a lot, which is why you don't do it at your desk. If you just want a physical job then sign up to be a mail carrier or bicycle courier.
I use a portable elliptical trainer that can be used standing or sitting down in a kind of peddling motion. It's non motorized and pretty quiet.
3 hours before I need to be at work and go to the gym, and try my damned hardest not to eat the free biscuits or cakes when I get in to the office.
The problem with slashdot is that most of its users were bullied and stuffed into lockers as kids!
C'mon!!
Other than hall walking breaks to relieve muscle tension, I do vigorous exercise outside of work.
Its a lot like advice for insurance: combing investing and insurance in one product usually shorts both.
There's no magical way that's going to keep you in shape without a little effort to eat well and take some time to exercise. Lay off the fritos and mountain dew. Stick to water and coffee/tea and get some veggies in your meals. Make time to exercise over lunch or right after work, for at least 30 min. You're just making excuses if you think you can't carve 30 min. out of your day. I go to the gym at lunch and find it makes me more relaxed and more productive at work.
And switch to water, for a start.
I knew I'd never reliably hit a gym, etc. (BTDT, repeatedly), and working out *at* work wasn't really feasible, so I worked out by going to / from work by bicycle. At first it was 5 miles each way, then I changed jobs and it was a 35 mile round trip, daily. Lost ~100 lbs in about 8 months. Have kept ~80 of those off since 2008...
geek. lawyer.
Even when I'm not going anywhere.
I have tried various things over the years. The best I ever found was to make myself run every day. Get in the habit of roll out of bed, go run, shower, go to work.
One day I went to work, then after eight hours I realized that I never even stood up. I was busy all day long, with all of my meetings coming to my office. I never got thirsty or had the call of nature. I realized that I had been sitting on my rear for a full eight hours. I try to at least go get coffee now...
For myself, I work remotely. This let's me take a break to exercise during the day (which in turn helps me stay alert and focused throughout the work day). If you don't have this kind of flexibility at your job, it comes down to what exercises can you do that won't leave you a sweaty mess. For that, I'd recommend yoga you can do at your desk, or standing practice. The latter is great for building lower body strength.
If you don't mind getting sweaty, exercise bands, push ups and fifer scissors/situps, can be great for your upper body, and easy to use/do quietly in a relatively small space.
Whatever you do, don't stand all day. Standing desks just switch out the health problems you get from sitting. Varying what you do is the best tact - if you stand most of the day, find time to sit and rest your legs (and vice versa).
I bike to work 2 - 3 times/week (In the winter months when it's dark at night, I tend to bike in once direction only and take transit home. It's a 19 mile ride so even a one way trip is pretty good exercise).
The dog makes sure I got out for at least one 30 minute walk or jog (the wife usually takes her for the afternoon walk).
I spend my lunch hour walking with a few coworkers.
I can't imagine that a treadmill would work well in the office -- I'd either be focused on the treadmill and not working, or be focused on working and not the treadmill and would end up tripping myself.
First of all reduce the crap that you're consuming, that's quite important as you can understand. That said, whatever applies to you:
- Walk/Cycle to work
- Use stairs whenever you find the chance (ascending only, be kind to your knees)
- Take breaks to go for a walk
- Go running after work (run to home perhaps?)
I exercise by lifting coffee cups.
I go to the gym during lunch and swim. 15min away, exercise for 1/2hr and back at work within the hour. The nice thing is, it splits the day in half.
See, it's a mat with conclusions on it. And then you jump to them.
Unless you've got a truly ridiculous commute, you can probably bike to work without taking much more time than driving. I've got a 7km commute that takes 15 mintues in rush-hour traffic. I can ride it in 20 (17 minutes is my personal best).
It takes an additional 15 minutes at work to shower and change, but that's 15 minutes that I'm not spending showering at home. All told, I get 40 minutes of exercise in a day with a net time loss of only 10 minutes. AND! I use the hot water at work (free!), where they don't have those horrible low-flow showerheads.
It may look like I'm doing nothing, but I'm actively waiting for my problems to go away.
--Scott Adams
I do the Power90 workout with my wife six mornings a week before going to work, then I have a treadmill desk at work where I walk all day as I code, read, surf, post on /. If we have a really early or hectic day ahead we move the workout to before dinner. If we're sick or injured in some way we modify the workout a bit. The big secret is not to push hard, just show up and keep moving. The workout is for cardio and strength, the treadmill desk wiped out any aches and pains and bad posture from hunching over and typing for 20 odd years.
Give yourself three months of drill instructor attitude to get in the habit and aim at 3 years to measure your results, just to avoid any short-term thinking. That worked great for us, and now it's just natural to get up and do it.
That's pretty much all you need.
[-- Trust the Monkey --]
One great trick, I probably saw it on lifehacker or similar, is to phrase your decisions in terms of priorities - i.e., when choosing to do activity X (TV, long lunch, etc.) instead of Y (gym, run, etc.), consider that you're saying, "no, X is a higher priority for me than Y right now." It's cheesy, but it help keep you focused.
Yes - bringing a home-made lunch saves a ton of money, and is much easier to portion-control with. Don't eat snacks at work (supply yourself with healthy alternatives if need be).
Instead of an hour lunch break, take an hour gym break to a nearby gym, or work with your supervisor for a flex hour instead of a lunch break, show up an hour later (and use that to go to a gym on your way in). You'll be *amazed* at the increase in your afternoon productivity by going to a gym in the middle of the day, instead of stuffing yourself at the nearest lunch spot.
Walk/Run/Bike to or from work - only works if you have access to a shower facility or public transit for one-way commutes at work
Join a gym, *hire a trainer*, set a schedule. I went to the gym 3x/week for 2 years, slowly lost 5 pounds. Added a trainer, lost another 5 pounds ... in 3 months.
It sounds like the company cares about health, which is a great start - getting access to shower facilities at work really opens up a lot of possibilities, so investigate some options there.
Returned Peace Corps IT Volunteer
Here is how I dealt with it:
1. Cut back on my work hours. That includes oncall response times. I found I can still get my work done in 40 that I used to do in 60 by working smarter instead of harder.
2. Ride a bicycle to work. If it is ten miles or less away from home, you can do it. If it is winter, consider zip ties on the tires for traction, or using cross country skis. Remember to use lights and have a loud horn.
a. Use a skate board if you are able to, and if you are close enough. Better work out.
b. Use public transit and walk to work if neither of the above work well.
3. Go walk a little every hour. Standing is fine, but walking will help a lot. Don't go longer than 2 hours without moving around.
4. Water, unsweetened coffee, or unsweetened tea. No more mountain dew, ever.
5. Cut carbs. That is how type 1 diabetics keep their blood sugar under control. Excess blood sugar gets converted to fat. The recommended daily minimum is about 200 carbs.
a. The easiest way is to completely fill up on green salad at every meal aside from breakfast. Eat anything you like after the salad.
b. Fats and everything else have to go through extra stages until they are broken down to sugars which get turned into fat.
c. Cut back on the salt. Cut it out entirely unless it is part of a recipe or already part of the meal.
6. Get uninterrupted sleep. If someone or something is making it harder to sleep, fix it.
7. Stretch a lot. People think exercise helps, but actually I found that a lot of stretching went a long way toward slimming me down and reducing my blood pressure. Stretching is also exercise.
8. Buy and wear really good shoes if standing and walking a lot. Extra weight can really mess up your lower joints until the benefits of exercise kick in.
So I'm a nerd who works in a chair all day, but I also weight train at least 3 times a week and run competitive times in everything from 5Ks to half-marathons, AND I used to weight about 320lbs (I weigh around 160 now). The trick? I treat it like I do everything else I love to do: I think of my workouts as ways to fix, tinker, and improve (dare I say, hack?) my body. It's easy to think of our computers (or whatever we work with daily) as important extensions of our physical selves, but we seem to do this to the detriment of our actual bodies. I wouldn't let one of my systems limp along with broken hardware/software and have spent hours or days fixing problems, so why shouldn't I commit half an hour a day (to begin with) to my own physical upkeep? It turns out that although it was a seemingly IMPOSSIBLE struggle at the onset, after several weeks I began to really genuinely enjoy it! Running in particular got me hooked because it's the sort of thing you can keep working on, and continue improving, without ever feeling like you're stagnating if you do it right. It seems to me that anyone with the typical geek mentality could easily change their mindset to feel the same way. Of course, it's just my experience, and therefore anecdotal at best, but still my 2 cents.
First -- having a standing desk is awesome, and you're probably doing more for yourself just with that than you could with an exercise program while still sitting 8+ hours a day.
Second -- take a break a few times a day and go for a brisk walk. Ten or fifteen minutes of walking will clear your head, helping your concentration for the next couple hours of work, and get your heart rate up a little.
Third -- cut out the crap and start eating healthy.
Fourth -- don't buy into the "you need to get motivated" crap. If getting motivated worked, there wouldn't be such a huge industry in motivational books/conferences/blogs. Motivation will last a week or two, but when that initial enthusiasm wears off willpower and discipline have to be there to take over long enough to establish new habits. For most people that takes about a month.
Fifth -- lead a balanced, healthy life. That's not always possible, but when something is out of whack in your life there are going to be consequences, so take care of yourself -- not just physically, but also mentally, emotionally, and spiritually.
Thomas
Was supposed to have been:
(Don't overdo it until you get used to it. Heart attacks while trying to get healthy are embarrassing.) When I started jogging, I went around the block, and I was done. Every few days I'd add another block until I was doing five miles a day. That seemed to be good enough and I didn't try to push it any further. Then my knees gave out, so I walk now.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Walk/Run/Bike to or from work - only works if you have access to a shower facility or public transit for one-way commutes at work
Cycling doesn't need to be that strenuous (if the commute isn't long), and is good exercise even if you don't sweat all that much. Considering that the cost of transport is included in the cost of exercise, and how efficient cycling is for both, it's really ridiculous how few people actually commute by bike.
Yeah, I know most of you'll say: it's cold and it rains, the traffic is dangerous, and it's just not practical for me. Some of you will be right, and many of you will be wrong.
Ingress makes you move around, I lost quite a bit of weight since I started playing ( http://www.ingress.com/ )
I get maybe 1-2 hrs of time in the evening, and I'm usually doing household chores during much of that time. Can't go to the gym because I need to be around if a kid wakes up.
I make do with an elliptical and doing body-weight exercises, but it's hard to find time.
Cannabis is a green leafy vegetable so that is definitely a healthy plan.
New Economic Perspectives
Most people in this thread are likely to focus on the highlighted part. And they are certainly good in doing so. Spending 45-60 minutes, 3 times a week, picking up heavy things off of the ground is one of the greatest things I have ever done for my strength and physique. It has been great for building muscle and cardiovascular health. However, when you say "fit" I assume you meant fat loss, first and foremost. And when it comes to fat loss that is done in the kitchen.
Well, here's my angle. Exercise is for strength, endurance and health. That is, when you lift you should be lifting to increase your strength and what you should be counting is the weight lifted and the reps repped. When you cardio, what you should be counting is miles ran/sprinted/biked. However, what many do is count the calories burned instead. And you do burn calories. You burn calories during the activity itself, you usually get a metabolic "afterburner" effect and you burn calories when your body rebounds (this also has the effect of partitioning a portion your dietary protein and fat towards tissue and hormone construction instead of just flat energy). And that's great. But you just CANNOT out train a shitty diet. Saying to yourself that you can eat/drink X today because you did Y is such a dead end, terrible, philosophy that gets many in trouble. The freedom to eat something because "you earned it" just leads to heartbreak for many. If you're going to exercise, exercise for the sake of your body's strength and health, but don't think that it will suddenly make that sugary coffee and bagel a non-factor in your obesity/diabetes.
That said, I honestly believe that the "fritos, tab, and mountain dew" part is the real core of the issue here. Refined sugars and grains coupled with modern fats (seed oils, trans-fats) are the bane of many peoples' lives. Insulin resistance, leptin resistance, celiac disease, IBS, SIBO, etc.. Simply switching to whole foods can almost entirely bypass this issue. Learn to cook your own meats, find tasty vegetable recipes, use fruits and nuts as calorie/nutrient dense desserts. When you do this the trans-fats disappear, the refined sugars and HFCS disappear, the 600+ grams of carbs a day disappear. You will learn the role that protein, fats and carbohydrates play in your body and how blindly trying to cut one of them to zero is a poor decision (seriously, when did we decide that we DIDN'T need dietary fat for healthy tissue and hormone production?). Your hunger will likely diminish as well as these foods tend to be VERY satiating.
It's funny when people ask how to get in shape that they will jump up and be ready to run in place for hours on end per week, but if you tell them that they will HAVE to cook their own meals, well, suddenly they're deers in headlights. People seem more willing to spend hours on end spinning away in their spin classes than spending a few minutes in the kitchen.
In summary:
Exercise = Strength, endurance, health
Diet = Fat loss, disease control, health
Do them together, but don't think you're going to get strong just through eating or that you're going to lose fat just through running.
Weighed myself this morning and am the same as I was in college (ca. 1980). I ride a bike to work every day, all year long. 35 miles (58 km) round trip. It takes about an hour longer than driving. So, I get two hours workout for an hour's time. Yeah, I live in California but I rode all year long in Michigan and Colorado. You just need to dress right...
As others have observed, it's not just about exercise; it's about diet too. The particular form that each takes doesn't matter as long as you do the math to make things balance out.
A typical adult male will burn ~2000 calories a day just sitting there staring into space (give or take a few hundred depending on age and weight). Now look at the calories of your favorite fast food and snacks and drinks -- a few hundred here, a few hundred there, and suddenly you're eating 4000 calories a day while still only burning 2000.
It takes 3500 calories to gain or lose a pound. If you eat 3500 calories more than you burn, you're up a pound. Eat 3500 calories fewer than you burn, you lose a pound. It's that simple. The hard part is counting calories when no nutritional information is available, and working out how many calories you actually burn for any given activity. The Compendium of Physical Activity is a great start if you want a more precise DIY formula tailored to your exact specifications, or there are any number of websites that will let you plug in your age and weight and amount of time at a standard activity, and spit out the calories burned. I keep mine on a spreadsheet, with the most frequently consumed foods in a quick table along with the most frequent physical activities. At the end of the day I get the difference between the two and know if I went overboard and need to starve myself for a couple of days, or if I can step on the scale with pride.
Now, a bunch of folks have recommended specific activities - run! go to the gym! ride a bike! Feh. *ANYTHING* you do that keeps your body moving so your heart rate goes up and you burn more calories than at rest is a good thing. Unless you're specifically targeting a muscle group for development, you will be equally successful whether you walk, run, do calisthenics, or have a marathon session of great sex with a gymnast. Personally I avoid running; my older brother ran religiously for 30 years and now his knees and ankles are completely shot and useless. It takes longer walking 3-4 miles and hour to burn the same calories you would running, but your body will thank you in 20 years for the lower-impact activities.
On the diet side, don't feel like you are doomed to never eat a pizza again. It's all in the math. When I can't stand going another day without ice cream or pizza, I have a serving or two and damn the calories. Then I just eat much lighter (all vegetables instead of meat and starches) for a couple of days to pay back for those extra calories, and/or do another 2-mile walk (250 calories).
Did it work? See for yourself. In August 2009 I was over 260 pounds. I started walking -- just a block or two and I was winded and in pain -- and watching my calories, and by July 2010 I was down to 160. That was actually too extreme; I gained 30 of that back and I no longer look so skeletal. But I can walk 2 miles without stopping to rest, and 4 miles with resting. That may not sound like much to people who still go snowboarding and have marathon sessions of great sex with gymnasts, but for me it's literally the difference between life and death.
Instead of an hour lunch break, take an hour gym break to a nearby gym [...]
Walk/Run/Bike to or from work - only works if you have access to a shower facility or public transit for one-way commutes at work.
Y'know, nearby gyms also have showers. If you can find a smaller place--most large corporate places don't have this--check with them about getting a "shower membership." Explain the situation and see what you can work out.
Another option: Sponge bath. Get two sponges. Soap one up and put clean water in the other one. Go into the handicapped stall, clean yourself up with the soapy sponge, rinse yourself off with the wet sponge. Get dressed.
I'll also throw my sweaty bike-shirt in the sink, run warm water on it, rinse it off, and hang it up behind the server rack. 30 minutes later, it's nice and dry.
That said, the most important thing about getting exercise is "Do you enjoy it?" If you don't enjoy bicycling, it's not going to be worth getting up early and dealing with the hassles involved. In which case, you probably should look for something else that you enjoy and do that instead.
I don't.
I ride my bike to work. gets my excercize in, a little bit each day, some fresh air, winning!
You don't have to run marathons or train for them to be healthier.
No, but it helps. Having actual goals that are not nauseatingly dull and that have a hard time limit go a long way toward keeping one motivated to keep going when one just doesn't want to.