Its been another week of improving my fitness while at the office. I have the timer plugin for google chrome which goes off every 20 minutes while i am in front of my computer. Its working pretty well so far. It has never gone off while i was away from the computer and there have been a few instances where i was meeting in my office with co-workers and had to postpone, which it has a handy button for.
My base rotation of movements right now includes:
-20’ish pushups
-10’ish air squats
-10 burpees
-20 toe touches, with shoulder flares upward at the top
-20 cross body floor touches with wide shoulder flares on the way up (with weight, something from the desk, to help with my shoulder rehab)
-20 leg lifts, with a mix of torso twists to get the core and obliques engaged
Every now and then i get a little rambunctious and add in a cross-office-space-bear-crawl. Our office space is 27 yards long… its a substantial bear crawl.
How does the progress look? Hard to say so far. I need to add some kind of logging to this process. Without that its purely my ‘perception’ of progress, which can be clouded by all kinds of thing. I am tracking which exercises i do in my head right now. execution is surely not perfect, and that’s OK! Sometimes the order gets re-arranged with different office activities going on, sometimes i have to cut a break short for a phone call with a client.
The data i do have suggests there is progress.
- Body weight is down two pounds. (Halloween candy is just about gone, and diet is getting back to normal as well)
- Doing the exercises keeps me warmer as the day goes on. If i skip a break i notice i get cold as my heart rate goes to resting duty.
- I am getting more reps in before i feel like sweat may start.
That last one is subtle but kind of matters. I am at my office for this stuff. i am an engineer by day. I cant be huffing, puffing and sweaty in my office… so part of my selection criteria for number of reps is based on how i feel during the break. For instance, I can feel when my heart rate/blood pressure is about to turn into sweat. And that is when i dial it back right now. The first week, 5 burpees from cold and i was ready to perspire. It would seem that now i can get to 8 or 9 before i get that same sensation, so i go that far plus 1 usually. easy math!
*DING* time for BURPEES!
I am usually done with a break within a minute of when the timer goes off.
The long and short of this is that the movements and timer activity is working into my daily routine well, almost unnoticed, and small progress is happening. Sometimes i am like… AGAIN?!, and sometimes its like… yep i am freezing lets get the blood pumping!
Progress… stick with it, no matter what and changes for the better will happen!
For interested parties, this is what the control panel looks like for the timer i have been playing with in Google Chrome. I may have to reach out to Thomas James Watson about his Break Timer and see if we can get in the sandbox together for the development of the OfficeFitLife workout timer.
