Are you a Desk Potato?

I usually like to talk tech in my blog entries, but today I’m digressing a bit in the interest of health.  I was in the middle of a four mile run the other day when I realized just how out of shape I am - a real desk potato.  A year ago I was running more than 20 miles a week without a problem.  I took a bit of time off after getting very busy, and now I can’t even run four miles without cringing and gasping.  This got me thinking about fitness and the entrepreneur, or even the busy office worker.  We get so busy trying to market, grow, and operate our business that we start to neglect our own bodies.  This is a recipe for disaster.

It’s a pretty easy concept to understand that the healthier you are, the better and longer life you are likely to live.  So we owe it to ourselves, our families, our employees, our customers, and our businesses to be and stay healthy.  Healthy living is really quite relative, but entails watching the input and output of your body.  Input being everything your body takes in (food, air, absorption), and output being the energy your body uses.  My focus for this blog is the output item called fitness, as this takes the most time.  The big question is: how can you jam fitness into an already overloaded day?  The answer is simple: you must make time!

Fitness is made up of three parts:

• Cardiovascular Training - Getting your heart rate above normal for extended periods of time (running, biking, etc.)
• Strength Training - Using resistance to challenge your muscles (lifting weights, push-ups, etc.).
• Flexibility Training - Keeping your body and muscles limber by stretching.

Cardiovascular training keeps your heart and lungs healthy and burns significant calories.  Excersise shouldn’t be less than 30 minutes at a time.  The minimum number of sessions in a week is three, but more is better and one is better than none.  So, get up early or take a long lunch and get some cardiovascular activity.  Personally, I prefer running as it’s the easiest to get started with and it really gets the heart pumping.  Once you are done with your activity, don’t forget to stretch for five minutes to get in your flexibility training and prevent injury.

Strength training builds muscle, raises metabolism, and burns calories.  Exercise can be as simple as body weight exercises like push-ups, sit-ups, knee-bends, and pull-ups.  It can also be taken further to weight training exercises using weights or Nautilus for exercises like bench-press, leg-press, and arm curls.  As a minimum, you ought to be strength training twice a week for 30 minutes.  Again, more is better, but one time is better than none.  Also, don’t forget to stretch for five minutes after you’re done.

The above is just a brief overview of what fitness entails and what you need to do to get started.  However, if you don’t have goals and/or accountability you won’t stick with it.  It’s so easy to say you don’t have time one day, and then it gets easier and easier to skip the workouts.  Before you know it, you’ll be off the exercise and eating lunch at McDonald’s.  So, how can you force yourself to stick with it?

• Have a goal - Loose a certain amount of weight, train for a race, etc.  When you meet that goal, set a new one.
• Have a partner - Pick someone or several people to exercise with or to be accountable to.  Talking to someone else about your exercise will really keep you motivated.
• Make it fun - Treat yourself to something special when you achieve certain milestones like a number of days in a row of exercising, or meeting your goal.

Right now, my goal is to break 20 minutes in a 5K race this fall.  I also have an exercise partner, my brother Mike.  Even with these two things helping me along, I still get the itch to skip.  So, I thought this would be a great opportunity to start an online social network as I discussed in a previous post.  The network doesn’t have a good name, so I’m open to ideas. For now I’ve called it Determined Desk Potatoes (http://deskpotatoes.ning.com), but I’m searching for something better. Regardless of the name, the network is for encouragement, ideas, photos, contests, and more for the improvement of health and fitness for business owners and other desk potatoes.  It’s free, it’s based on the ning network, and hopefully it’ll help keep us healthy!  Please email me or leave a comment to suggest a name. See you there…

Dan
Determined Desk Potato

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