GETTING ENOUGH EXERCISE
Whatever day it happens to be that you are reading these words, 1,000 Canadian baby boomers (those born between 1946 and 1964), as well as 7,918 American baby boomers will turn 60 today. Happy birthday! For them, and for those who follow them, the threat of heart disease is ever present. In the opinion of many cardiologists, dieticians, and other professionals, this is due, in part, to a
laissez-faire
attitude towards personal health, combined with the requirements of a busy career and consequently letting exercise slide. As a result, cardiovascular disease (CVD), which includes high blood pressure, coronary heart disease, and stroke is now the single leading cause of death in both Canada and the United States.
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Shauna worked for the media department of a large organization. She used to enjoy going to the gym. She saw and felt the benefits of regular workoutsâbetter sleep, better mood, better resistance to colds, overall better feeling. But as the pressures of work became greater, her workouts were always the first thing to be sacrificed. First, occasionally, and then more regularly, she rescheduled them until finally her running shoes started to gather dust.
She said, “Every day the work takes me to 5:30 or 6:00, sometimes later. It doesn't make sense to go to the gym at 6:30. If I did, that would mean I'd not get home until 8:30 or later.”
Shauna was focused on her work, on being busy. But she was not able to perceive that being busy and being productive are not the same things. As we have seen, email, meetings, and distractions make people feel busy, and indeed they may be legitimate components of work. But she was not able to see how speed and overload had blinded her to being able to tell the difference.
Great Ways to Reassign Work
⢠Observe patterns in your day and week to see where quieter times exist.
⢠Schedule your most important tasks for early morning and defend the time against intrusion.
⢠Set up a buddy system with a colleague, who can cover for you and vice versa.
⢠Identify tasks that can and should be delegated. How many tasks are you currently doing that could be done by someone else?
⢠Negotiate. There's most always room for a suitable alternative to now.
When Shauna did an audit of her work patterns, including the most important types of work, the nature and frequency of the emails she was responding to, and the “human element” (the expectations of her boss and of her external and internal clients), she realized that the key work components could be reassigned to specific hours. She applied more conscious control over casual conversations and drop-in visitors, and made a point to not let time slip by. Her careful choice of meals and snacks kept her alertness level high, and most important, she took time to ask her manager outright whether a change to her schedule was possible. She and her manager worked on this together and agreed that she could leave work a half-hour earlier, provided that her key assignments were up to date. She agreed to come in a half-hour earlier on her workout days and most importantly, she made sure to reserve time with her manager once a week, every week, to demonstrate how her productivity had actually improved through this new pattern.
Shauna found she was also better able to deal with her colleagues, some of whom observed her early departure and immediately questioned her loyalty and team spirit. Shauna found she was able to educate her team through communication. She explained to them how the work they needed from her would still be completed on time, that she herself remained available and accountable throughout the day, and she showed them how her open-door policy was not going to be adversely affected. With their needs and concerns met, Shauna was able to condition herself and her colleagues into working well within these slightly modified timelines. Her slightly earlier departure allowed her three workouts a week, and she was still able to get home in time for dinner.
The success factor was not Shauna's dedication to working out; it was that she took the time to slow down and communicate with her manager and with her co-workers. That's what gave her the permission and the freedom to go to the gym.
When Is a Good Time to Exercise?
People often ask me what the best time of day is for exercise. Such a question can be answered, but not simply. There are many factors to take into account, since not all exercise is equal. Running outdoors is much more difficult than running on a treadmill, due to sidewalk friction, air resistance, and changes in surface angle and grade. Lifting weights for three sets of 20 reps has a different impact on muscle development than six sets of 10 reps. Doing cardiovascular exercise with a mid-level active heart rate for 30 minutes has profoundly different effects on the body than does high-speed sprinting for 20 minutes.
As people age, their bodies react differently to food (including excess food), sleep, stress, excess, deprivation, and exercise. That's why it's so important to know yourself; to slow down long enough to hear your body tell you what it wants and when. Are you morning oriented? If so, are you able to get in a workout before work? Some people find it easy to get up at 5:00 a.m. and hit the gym. It's an excellent way to start a day. Others, however, cannot do that. Many people cannot face exercise first thing in the morning, no matter how good it might be for them. So, then, what remains for morning-oriented people, whose best time for energy and activity is the morning, but who can't get to the gym before work and who also can't delay work to spend time at the gym? Does that mean they're doomed to not get any exercise at all? That need not be the case.
Some people may be able to put into effect the same type of flexibility that Shauna demonstrated in the case above, but in reverse. They might renegotiate start times so they can arrive at the office a little later, and, if need be, work a little later to balance it out. Others might be able to find the time within the workday. More and more employers are providing on-site fitness centers or corporate health club memberships along with the permission to use them. Refer, once again to the AstraZeneca example in Chapter 4.
Still others may be able to adopt Shauna's situation more directly by setting up staggered departure times, and by communicating the value and benefits of doing so to their manager and team. When the only time available for exercise is late afternoon, even if late afternoon is not your optimum time, it is still possible to make best use of the opportunity by slowing down and choosing a food intake schedule for the day more carefully.
In the
Fortune
magazine article “How I Work,” the CIO of Pimco puts it as follows:
For a portfolio manager, eliminating the noise is critical. You have to cut the information flow to a minimum level. You could spend your whole day reading different opinions. For me, that means I don't answer or look at any emails I don't want to. Other than for my wife, I'll only pick up the phone three or four times a day. I don't have a cell phone, I don't have a [wireless PDA]. My motto is, I don't want to be connectedâI want to be disconnected.
The most important part of my day isn't on the trading floor. Every day at 8:30 a.m., I get up from my desk and walk to a health club across the street. I do yoga and work out for probably an hour and a half, between 8:30 and 10:00. There have only been two or three times in the past 30 years when someone has come across the street and told me I should get back to the office. One of them was the 1987 market crash.
There's an understanding here that that's my haven. Some of my best ideas literally come from standing on my head doing yoga. I'm away from the office, away from the noise, away from the Bloomberg screensânot to mention that standing on your head increases the blood flow to your brain.
After about 45 minutes of riding the exercise bike and maybe ten or 15 minutes of yoga, all of a sudden some significant light bulbs seem to turn on. I look at that hour and a half as the most valuable time of the day.
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All exercise, when done correctly, is good. But the benefits of
cooling down
reveal themselves in the exercise room just as they do in other areas. For people who are looking to burn off that spare tire of stored fat during the workweek, slow exercise is far more efficient than a high-impact workout. Fast aerobics may be good for getting the cardiovascular system in shape, but they don't burn stored energy as efficiently. Fat burning happens when exercise is of lower impact but longer duration, for instance, 20 to 30 minutes on a cycling machine or treadmill, three times a week.
Maintaining Commitment
Most people who exercise regularly notice by the second week that the exercise itself becomes addictive. The body gets used to exercise, and starts to “ask” for it. However for the first few days, getting into a habit may seem difficult. One of the best approaches is to buddy upâto make a commitment with a friend to visit the gym together. This makes procrastination or rescheduling more difficult since it would inconvenience two people, not just one.
Also, consider entering your workouts into your calendar as recurring activities. This
reifies
the event, making it real both in your own mind as well as in the minds of other people in your working world.
Use a log to keep track of your workouts, laps, minutes, etc. A log is useful in four distinct ways:
⢠First it serves as a guide and a goal: you have a target to aim for.
⢠Second, it is a written commitment. As we have already seen, written material carries far greater weight and credibility than do thoughts that circulate in short-term memory.
⢠Third, the act of checking something off as completed is a powerful reinforcer. It feels good to put a check mark next to today's scheduled exercise, and to say, “Yes, I've done that.”
⢠Fourth, it is less pleasurable to skip a workout when it's written, planned, and scheduled. It is crucial, especially during the first two weeks of a new exercise regime, not to miss any workouts.
Do you find long workouts boring? Is that one of the reasons why it is so difficult to motivate yourself to do it daily? It's true. Thirty minutes on an exercise bike can seem extremely dull to anyone who has just stepped out of their high-speed working world. But there are solutions. Here are a few:
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Music.
Your favorite tunes are more accessible and portable than ever before. It is easy to put together a collection of high-energy dance tunes by your favorite artists as a custom soundtrack to your workouts. Download them from a tunes site and play them on CD, MP3, or any other format. Studies have shown that workouts are more effective when there is danceable music present since the beat keeps the body in pace and passes the time pleasantly.
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Spoken-word books.
These, too, are available in both downloadable format and also by mail. (Recommended suppliers are listed in this chapter's How to Cool Down section. There are thousands of book titles that have been recorded, often by well-known actors. Each CD is generally an hour long, perfectly timed for a great workout. View exercise as an opportunity to get in shape and catch up on all those books you've been meaning to read. But don't read them; listen to them!
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Movies.
These are also available in “rental-by-mail” formats, just like spoken-word books. With portable DVD players costing under $100 in some cases, it's easy to prop one up on the console of a treadmill or exercise cycle and let the time slide by.
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Thinking with your eyes closed.
Though this one may not seem as stimulating as the previous suggestions, exercising on a safe setup, such as a treadmill, exercise bike, or stair climber means you can do it with your eyes closed. This allows your blue-skying thoughts to arrive in good form. They're yours for the taking, every day, and it gets easier with practice. Once you know that you will have 30 minutes of daily eyes-closed aerobic exercise, creative thoughts, positive thoughts, deep thoughts willingly appear before you. I recommend this technique heartily, but with two reminders: 1) Make sure your setup is safe, e.g., no loose shoelaces or other potential dangers and 2) Make sure to have something close by to record your great ideasâthey're too valuable to lose.
For people who are looking to build more muscle or develop muscle tone, it may surprise you to learn that lifting weights slowly is far better than doing “power sets” or using the “clean and jerk” approach. Lifting weights more slowly enables you to employ proper technique, which ensures the right muscle groups are being used and challenged. The human body is capable of using numerous other muscle groups to compensate or share the load. This means that many people who invest the time to work out with weights waste a great deal of it through improper technique. (The actual technique and motion required is best learned by taking the time to ask a qualified trainer at your health club to work with you.) Proper,
cool
technique also reduces the risk of injury, since the weight is moved in the proper direction, offering the right type of resistance to the muscle. In addition to using the wrong muscle groups and/or risking injury, people who work their weights or weight machines too quickly tend to use momentum, not strength to move the weight. This is a subtle, unintentional form of cheating that reduces the demand on the muscles being trained as soon as the weight gets moving. A good weight movement should be slow and steady on the way out and on the way home, using care and focus to keep it safely in line. This, of course, reflects the
slow
principle perfectly: the difference between doing something of substance versus the false satisfaction of just feeling busy. True productivity, both at the desk and in the gym, really does require a
cool
approach.