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?"
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!!
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.
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
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.
You aren't going to do jack in terms of serious cardio or muscular exertion unless your white-collar-knowledge-worker environment tolerates people who look like they think that 'data mining' is something you do with a pickaxe.
However, in terms of destroying your fitness less slowly while at work you have options that are worth considering: If you need caffeine, go with (unsweetened/not-full-of-milkfat) coffee or tea, or a pill. Not a soda. Also, try to distinguish between loss of energy caused by boredom or need for sleep(not a good thing; but temporarily treatable with mild stimulants) from loss of energy caused by hunger(eat something lean and proteinacious). Assorted caffeine+sugar snacks are seductive because the combination of stimulants and a quick energy burst allows you to do a mediocre job of fighting off either kind of slump; but they tend to bite you because if you just need some caffeine you end up consuming hundreds of calories in corn syrup, or if you really need some food, you end up letting hunger drive you into using more stimulants than you need, and crashing once the sugar spike wears off.
None of that will actually make you 'fit' worth a damn, nor will it save you from 'research suggests that people who get less than X exercise die early'; but it is a comparatively painless way to cut down the amount of 'fit-as-in-not-fat' effort you'll need to put in at the gym later. Ideally, you'll even be forced to find a more stable, less spike/crash prone hunger and stimulant cycle, which won't exactly hurt your efforts to get some exercise either before or after work.
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.
What the poster meant was that he's just too lazy to go to the gym when he could be at home watching TV.
It is not a matter of laziness. A gym membership is expensive, and going there is time consuming. The closest gym to me costs $80/month and is a 20 minute commute each way. I work till 6pm, then after an hour of meal prep, eating, and cleanup, I have about two hours with my kids before they go to bed. I am not going to cut that in half so I can go to the gym.
I stay in shape with a stand-up workstation, and we have a treadmill in front of a internet connected TV in the break room. I usually put about three miles on the treadmill while I watch the PBS Newshour. A treadmill at my desk does not work, because I cannot walk and type at the same time. I have seen salespeople do it successfully, but they spend their time talking into a phone headset rather than typing. I don't see that working for a coder.
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
That's bullshit right there. Strength training is done for short periods of time and large amounts of weight. If it takes you that much time, then you're doing it wrong.
I realize that the fitness industry has everybody conditioned to think that they need to do a dozen different workouts and you've got to hit puny muscle Y, but if you're moving your body as a unit, you'll hit all of those spots. And the fact of the matter is, that there's no reason to be hitting most of those small muscles anyways as they're already getting a work out whenever you're working their antagonizing muscles.
You do 6 exercises across the week and yeah, I guess 10-20 is a bit on the low side, but an hour 3 times a week is way more than what it takes. I work out about an hour a week, tops, and I'm definitely growing strong.
You look at the way people spend their work out time, the penny ante crap that does nothing for them. The stretching and the cool downs, and the multiple exercises that work the same basic groups of muscles, and yeah, if you do cut out all that crap that you don't need in the first place, you can easily cut out half or a third of your time. Not to mention the fact that if you're going into a gym to work out, there's a ton of down time in the middle of your work out when you're switching equipment or waiting on gear.
Not to mention that gyms are mostly pointless rip offs. You DO NOT need to go into a special environment to exercise. For some people it helps, sure, but it's not absolutely necessary. You don't need a special machine to exercise your legs, jog on the spot, put a crate down and do step aerobics, do squats. Specialised equipment isn't a necessity and usually is there simply to make you feel like you've got your money's worth.
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.
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.
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.
It won't get you in shape, either.
If you work out an hour a week, tops, you're not in shape. You're probably getting stronger, but you're not in shape.
If you want to find out what kind of shape you're in, get a heart rate monitor and GPS tracker (there are cell phone apps for this) and run for an hour outdoors with your heart rate around 150-165. "Good shape" will get you 7.5 miles. Good weekend triathletes will get 10 miles. Professional triathletes will get 12. Oh, and do this two or three days consecutively, because if you're at least in "good shape" you won't have much, if any, soreness or fatigue on the second or third day.
Having said that, you can get into decent shape with minimal time investment for a particular sport. Running three times per week for about an hour each time in Zone 1 will get you nicely in shape for running, and you'll be in ok shape for other sports, to boot.
Man, what is this? Of course exercise takes a time commitment. It's only your FUCKING HEALTH. Why shouldn't it take a time commitment?
Listen, I know we all have busy days and too much to do and we'd like to sit down and relax. The answer is to work less and rest and relax more. I know that's hard to sell, but it's the honest truth.
Wake up early, go to work, put in your 8 best hours, and then leave and go walk or run or ride your bike for an hour or two. On the weekends, do some exercise in the morning after a small breakfast, and then go for another walk or whatever before coming home to lunch. Then you can go on with the rest of your day.
Don't look at exercise as a chore. You don't have to run marathons or train for them to be healthier. I listen to a lot of science podcasts while I ride and walk, so I'm always learning something.
It's your life and health on the line here. What are you even working for if it's not to live a good life?