Most of us want to exercise more but work gets in the way. That’s not laziness or a lack of drive, it’s hour-long commutes, back-to-back meetings and other priorities at home.
During 7 years at HSBC, there were long periods of time where I fought, and lost, the battle between balancing a demanding career with a healthy lifestyle.
I’d blame the bank for making me flit between being stationary on a swivel chair and being stationary on various modes of public transport. But at least I had my weekends.
Covid.
Locked in on the two days I relied on to squeeze in a week’s worth of exercise, I now had to accept that ‘little and often’ was the only way to achieve anything / stay sane.
After finally starting to listen to my Apple Watch demanding that I stand every hour, I realised that with such little structure in my life I could use other prompts to schedule physical activity into my day, and that there were plenty of these in my work diary.
This week I’m going to talk about how an ‘inflexible’ work routine can double up as a ‘structured’ exercise plan.
After 7 years in banking, I know what you can realistically do, and none of these tips require time, equipment or money. Having now qualified as a PT, I’m able to tell you exactly what making some little changes could do for your health.
So, to prove that these work, I’ll also tell you how quickly you’d burn a pound of fat if you adopted them. Surely that’s enticing enough for you to come keep coming back.
Over the next 5 days I’m going to explain how you can increase output, work fewer hours and burn fat at the same time.
But First…Where Are We Now?
Before I dive into it, I wanted to highlight why we struggle to see how work can support exercise and how that should change because of Covid.
80% of office workers sit at their desks for at least 67 days per year.
It isn’t doing it maliciously, but the traditional corporate environment is designed to minimise how much you move. Efficient public transport. Toilets on every floor. Coffee machines at an arm’s length. Whole teams within earshot. Back-to-back meetings. Swivel chairs (the chairs thought they were safe).
Most of these things are great for productivity and aren’t inherently bad, but together they build a system where, if you’re not careful, your body can stagnate almost solidly for a 10-hour window.
Even with the ‘freedom’ working from home brought, a Guardian article found that UK employees were spending 2 more hours a day at their desk following the pandemic…we just swapped our commute for more desk-hours.
For years I thought of my routine as inflexible, that it was impossible to mould it to work for me and my goals. Then the flexibility shown by the workforce when Covid struck showed me that couldn’t be true.
In a matter of months, 120,000 people that worked daily in Canary Wharf just stopped going…and nothing changed.
If the operating model of the world could adapt almost immediately to accommodate a global pandemic…how is it that my routine can’t accommodate an extra 15 minutes of exercise a day?
In truth, every single person has the tools to exercise more without having to make any real changes or commitments. In this series I’m going to give you some ways to do this that will help you lose weight.
Planned, Structured, and Repetitive…Work or Exercise?
Take a look at the definition of exercise:
‘A subset of physical activity that is planned, structured, and repetitive and has a final or intermediate objective of improving or maintaining physical fitness.’
Exercise is the act of improving or maintaining your physical fitness through planning, structure and repetition.
Well, there’s definitely one thing we can all agree on, and it’s that work is planned, structured and repetitive!
That means the bedrock of exercise and work are the same principles…so why can’t one support the other?
I’m not saying that by tweaking your work routine and following these steps you can expect to gain muscle mass or shave seconds off your 5km, but you absolutely can make sure that you burn more calories than you consume.
By doing that, you put yourself in a calorie deficit. If any aspect of your fitness journey includes losing weight, these tips will help you reach your goals.
For the rest of the week, I’ll tell you how to build an effective exercise programme into your week and rapidly burn calories by using your work routine as a springboard.
Tomorrow, I’ll explain how, by actually working fewer hours and being smart with the time you’ve got back, you can burn an extra 3600 calories (the equivalent of one pound of fat) every 22.5 days…interested?
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