This post is first in a series of six articles on why you should care about fitness. We often don’t realize how investments in one aspect of life provide benefits not just in their own realm, but in many other areas of life as well.
Adopting a fitness regimen will not only make you more fit, but will also affect your career, your marriage and other relationships, and your disposition. In this post, we’ll explore how fitness pays dividends in your productivity.
The enemy
Many of our jobs involve something quite harmful to the production of quality work and creative thinking–a desk chair. Study after study indicates that one of the most dangerous things we do in our daily lives is spending long periods of time sitting in a chair. Read here for more detail on the studies backing this claim.
Look at it this way–your body was made to move. God did not give you muscles, joints, a cardiovascular system and a digestive system so you could sit still all day. Your body is a machine designed for a purpose, and when you don’t engage your body’s systems properly, it doesn’t work properly.
The first step
The good news for those of us who’ve adopted poor fitness habits is that the body is incredibly adaptable. If you will start incorporating movement into your daily life, your body will adapt and get stronger and fitter in a remarkable way. One very simple way to get started is to find a coffee machine, water fountain, or any other excuse that’s a good distance from your desk. Make a habit of getting out of your chair and walking to your excuse of choice once every 1.5 hours or so. If you can walk up and down a flight of stairs along the way, that’s all the better.
The next step is to find 15-20 minutes a few times a week to start engaging your body in a more strenuous workout, pushing your limits and giving you big gain potential. Walking around the office is good for getting your blood moving and keeping your chair from killing you, but to truly engage your body’s systems and reap the productivity benefits, you’ll need something more challenging.
Where can your workout fit?
I’m blessed to have a small gym and shower facilities at my workplace, so I’m able to workout over lunch most days. This is ideal, as it really allows my body and brain to be kicked into high gear for the afternoon. It’s amazing how a morning that was quickly turning into drudgery and poor quality output can be turned around by a lunchtime workout. Even if you can’t make this happen at your job, can you get a workout in before you come in in the morning? Or ride your bicycle into work to get your body’s systems going before you boot up your computer? Use your creativity to find how a workout can fit into your day. Remember, our fitness philosophy here at TotalThriver revolves around short, high-intensity workouts with functional movements requiring little equipment, so there’s incredible flexibility in terms of where and when you can workout, and the time commitment is quite minimal.
In summary, we’re advocating a strategy of moving from your chair every few hours and working out as near to your work time as possible. The most dramatic evidence for just how effective this is at boosting productivity and creativity is available directly to you. Try this: ramp up over a period of a few weeks until you’re doing a challenging workout 4 out of 5 workdays per week. You will notice a dramatic difference in your capabilities when compared to where you were before you began the regimen. Also, you’ll notice that anytime you have to miss a workout (for a meeting, a sick kid, etc.) that you’re just not at your best on those days. It almost feels like someone stuck with you with a needle and is sapping energy out of you. Once you feel the new capacity that this fitness regimen gives you, you feel like you’ve been cheating yourself out of so much latent ability that you never knew you had.
Test the claim
The great part is, this new productivity and energy level that you get from the fitness regimen can be a great motivator for keeping with the program. On days that I miss a workout, I know that I’m not able to put forth my best on the work I’m doing, and I desire that workout tomorrow all the more. When I get back in the gym and pour my all into a hard workout, I get such a feeling of satisfaction and my body is so thankful to get it’s systems moving again. Best of all, when I head back to my office for the afternoon, I’m energized and refreshed, and my tasks are knocked out with quality, creativity, and excellence. If this sounds like the kind of productivity boost you’d like to add to your day, why not head over to the ThriveFit page and give workout #1 a try? You can test these claims for yourself and see the tangible benefit in a very short time. Be sure to ramp yourself up gradually into any new program to reduce injury likelihood and to keep you from falling off the bandwagon after a week and a half. Keep the workouts short, the form correct, and the intensity high!