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How to … Incorporate Exercise into Your Daily Life

December 23, 2022 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

How to ... Incorporate Exercise into Your Daily Life An “exercise snack” is a short bite of physical activity you can do anywhere, anytime. You don’t even need to change your clothes. Try ten push-ups, stair climbing, brisk walking, or jogging around the block.

Exercise snacking increases the physical activity in your day and breaks up sedentary time, which is increasingly linked to chronic health risks.

It may not seem like much, but several scientific studies show that interleaving brief fitness routines a few times into your day not only encourages your body to feel better, but also contributes to meaningful gains in fitness and overall health. It improves your mood, stimulates creativity, and enhances focus, making it an all-around win for your health and productivity. Best of all, exercise snacking removes the pressure of committing to a long, once-a-day sweaty session.

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Filed Under: Health and Well-being, Sharpening Your Skills Tagged With: Balance, Discipline, Getting Things Done, Motivation, Time Management, Wellbeing

Start the Day with a Workout

January 7, 2021 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Start the Day with a Workout People who exercise in the mornings rave about the positive benefits of morning exercise compared to working out later in the day.

  • Exercising improves blood flow to the brain. It gives you a more alert mind—helping you become more energized and more focused. The sense of accomplishment from a morning workout puts you in a better frame of mind, and you’ll feel mentally prepared to tackle the day’s challenges.
  • Exercise is shown to intensify the body’s metabolic rate for four to eight hours. If you work out in the morning, the resulting metabolism boost can last all through the most productive part of your day.
  • There’s some evidence that habits tend to establish more quickly if pursued in the mornings. The concentration of cortisol, the body’s primary stress hormone, is highest soon after you get up in the morning. Waking up earlier in the morning strengthens the body’s cortisol awakening response. One study proposed that cortisol blocks the prefrontal cortex in the brain, suggesting that consistent morning behavior is more likely to become habitual.
  • After slogging all day, your willpower to spend an hour at the gym peters out. Moreover, the more time you have to think, the more time you’ll have to come up with “justifications” for ducking out of a workout later in the day.
  • Waiting until later in the day to exercise also increases the likelihood that something will crop up and impede your plan. If you can be disciplined enough to go to bed sooner and wake up a little earlier, you can get a workout done before any distractions can emerge.

Idea for Impact: Could the benefits of a regular morning workout be worth sacrificing a few more minutes in a warm, cozy bed?

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Filed Under: Health and Well-being Tagged With: Time Management, Wellbeing

Less is More is True. 4-Day Workweek Is Better For Everyone.

December 7, 2020 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Unilever New Zealand announced last week that it would begin a one-year experiment to allow its staff of 81 to work four days per week while earning their full salaries: “The whole premise is not to do 40 hours in four days … Our goal is to measure performance on output, not time. We believe the old ways of working are outdated and no longer fit for purpose.” If successful, Unilever will roll this initiative out to 155,000 workers around the world.

Microsoft Japan tried 4-day workweeks for a month two summers ago and reported a 40 percent jump in productivity as measured by sales per employee (I think that isn’t a suitable metric.)

4-Day Workweek Is Better For Everyone

People aren’t entirely productive all the time.

I’m a big fan of letting employees think about how they can work differently and encouraging them to develop their own productivity measures. As British historian C. Northcote Parkinson posited in 1955, “Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.”

Although, switching to four 10-hour days has its disadvantages. When Utah had its state employees work four 10-hour days from 2008 to 2011, many reported that they lost energy and focus in the last third of their workdays.

A reduced or even compressed week can give employees the benefits that matter the most—notably, the flexibility to organize their lives based on what matters most to them. Employers, in reality, borrow employees from everything else in their lives (hence the word ‘compensation.’)

Idea for Impact: Society needs to ratchet down the time people spend at work.

Once people come to terms with the fallacy of valuing work as an end in itself, the 4-day workweek’s appeal will spread, and it’ll springboard to bigger things. Karl Marx, Bertrand Russell, John Maynard Kaines, even recent U.S. presidential aspirant Andrew Yang have argued the merits of reducing the working week to help alleviate over-consumption, greenhouse gas emissions, overwork, unemployment, and other entrenched sociopolitical inequalities.

Some employers will undoubtedly use four-day workweeks as a pathway to get five days of work in four, push unpaid work, or reduce pay (58% of Americans are paid by the hour.)

Not all business models make the 4-day workweek possible, but businesses will become accustomed to the practicalities of ensuring customer needs are dealt with on all five days.

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Filed Under: Business Stories, Career Development, Health and Well-being Tagged With: Balance, Mindfulness, Wellbeing, Work-Life

Health and Fitness for the Sedentary Professional

April 2, 2009 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Busy professionals tend to live a deskbound lifestyle. Their hectic schedules develop into easy excuses for abandoning regular exercise patterns. Consequently, their sedentary lifestyles, when combined with insufficient sleep, a disregard for healthful eating and drinking habits and the greater levels of stress in the modern workplace, can lead to fatigue and ill health over time.

Here are nine simple suggestions to encourage the busy professional lead a healthier lifestyle at work.

Walking for Better Office Fitness

Practice Simple Workouts

  • Consider a healthier commute. Bike or walk to work at least once a week. If you ride a bus or train, get off a prior stop and walk the remainder.
  • Take stairs instead of elevators. Research suggests that climbing stairs can burn as much as seven times the calories burned when using an elevator.
  • Seek out opportunities to stand or walk. Walk up to colleague’s desks instead of instant messaging, emailing, or calling them. Take longer routes to restrooms, water fountains, meetings rooms, and others’ desks.
  • Take walks during breaks or after lunch. Consider starting a lunchtime walking group with like-minded coworkers. Walk for twenty minutes at a nearby park, around your office building or in the hallways. Better yet, take the stairs to walk up a few flights. Doing exercises in a group is more enjoyable and helps sustain the habit.
  • Stretch at your desk. Adopt a handful of simple exercises to stretch your fingers, wrists, arms, shoulders, chest, neck, back, and legs. Although these activities do not contribute to any form of serious aerobic exercise, they are nevertheless advantageous to promote fitness and reduce anxiety.

Eating healthy at work

Eat and Drink Healthier

  • Eat healthy. Do not skip breakfast or lunch. Favor full-service salad bars or healthy choice menus at company cafeterias. Better yet, pack your lunch — it is economical too. Regulate your eating when dining-out with customers, visitors or management — studies suggest that we tend to overindulge in social settings or while on expense accounts.
  • Keep a supply of low-calorie, nutritious snacks, raw vegetables and fruits at your desk. These serve as healthier choices to snack food usually stocked in office vending machines.
  • Avoid indulging in sugar- and calorie-laden pastries, pies, cakes, cookies doled out on birthdays and anniversaries, or spread out in break rooms.
  • Drink more water. Try to limit carbonated beverages and fruit juices to one can/bottle a day. Avoid caffeine in the evenings to prevent sleep deprivation at night — the half-life of caffeine is about six hours.

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Filed Under: Health and Well-being Tagged With: Wellbeing

Working Exercise into a Busy Day

July 3, 2007 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Ways to Work Exercise into a Busy Day

The benefits of physical activity and exercise are well known: reduced risk of chronic diseases, lower stresses, increased physical fitness, improved sleep, greater self-confidence, etc. However, incorporating physical activity into our demanding schedules can be very challenging.

Recently, the Wall Street Journal offered five great guidelines to help include exercise into a busy day. See the full article here.

  1. Exercise early in the morning. Typically, after work, you’re hungry, exhausted and you have family obligations. Exercising early in the morning can give a great energy boost.
  2. Stay close to home or office for convenience. If possible, possess exercise equipment at home.
  3. Mix exercise with family time. For instance, ask family or friends to join you in the morning-walks; this will help you stay motivated.
  4. Do a weekend workout. The weekend offers two days of opportunity.
  5. Stay active during the day. Mix exercise into your daily activities.

Call for Action

benefits of physical activity and exercise With the help of a physician or a personal trainer, choose activities that are appropriate for your fitness level and your goals. Be realistic in what you can achieve. Schedule exercise in your calendar.

Make the most of small bits of time that become available during the day. Take the stairs instead of an elevator; park your car as far as possible in the parking lot and walk into your office; take a quick walk around your office building when you need a break from work.

Take time out–do not exercise every day. Regular breaks allow for recovery and return to exercise with renewed vigour.

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About: Nagesh Belludi [hire] is a St. Petersburg, Florida-based freethinker, investor, and leadership coach. He specializes in helping executives and companies ensure that the overall quality of their decision-making benefits isn’t compromised by a lack of a big-picture understanding.

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