As I arrived at the office one morning I couldn’t help but feel fortunate to work with highly capable colleagues in a productive and efficient environment.
If you are used to nothing, then your first workout should be just a little bit more than nothing
As we proceeded to attack the piles of incoming work sitting on our desks, my stomach churned. It too did its very best to attack the piles of work on its very own desk, or more specifically, to digest the copious amounts of incoming nutrients as I push into the fifth week of my latest bulking-up cycle.
As efficient workers tend to business, they learn their craft, gain experience and ultimately discover the best ways of doing things. The more work they do, the better they get at it. Unfortunately, however, we all know that there are such things as inefficiency and laziness out there. I momentarily breathed a sigh of relief that I wasn’t surrounded by these gremlins myself.
What makes us lazy at work? It’s just a guess, but after working in a variety of jobs in different settings and cultures, to my view it would seem the less we have to do, the less we eventually are prepared or even able to do.
Picture this: as you make your way over to your desk each morning from the tea and coffee station, your in-tray typically welcomes you with about two or three pending tasks. You sit down comfortably and, sipping your milky brew, leisurely amble through your modest to-do list up until lunchtime.
But what happens that one fine morning when you stop dead in your tracks and behold an in-tray stuffed with 50 urgent tasks? You nearly drop your piping hot mug in disbelief, as your boss drops an even more painful two-hour deadline on you.
Most likely, you will not achieve the deadline. Realistically, the work will probably sit on your desk while you stressfully trundle through it at the snail’s pace to which you have become accustomed. It’s just too much work, and you’re just not used to it.
The efficient office successfully processes a consistently high volume of work without mishap or strife. The inefficient office, on the other hand, successfully or unsuccessfully processes, in varying quality, an inconsistent volume of work. But why are we talking about offices and work? Well, as my churning stomach reminded me, the human body is not at all that different.
When discussing lifestyle change with clients or acquaintances keen on getting healthier and fitter, the same old stumbling blocks seem to crop up over and over again. These stumbling blocks always remind me of that old inefficient office.
The first port of call for many people wishing to lose weight seems to be the starvation tactic. It makes sense on the surface, but it is a fact of life that we must eat to survive. Starving your body of nutrients is a little bit like starving an office of work.
You won’t be able to starve yourself forever, so you will invariably fall for temptation sooner or later. Whatever food you ingest at this point, especially if it’s something sweet, will be just like those 50 urgent tasks cluttering up that dreaded in-tray. Like an ugly pile of paperwork heaped on a disorganised desk, this particular type of work will heap itself right around your hips, thighs and belly.
By ingesting the correct amount of healthy food into your system, your body becomes more efficient at processing it and using it for the precise purposes for which it is intended: restoring and rebuilding bodily tissues and fuelling working muscles. The more workers do, the better they get at it.
Do you really want your workers to get lazy and inefficient? Can you imagine becoming unable to process food into energy or rebuild and heal yourself? There’s a word for that: disease. The starvation tactic won’t just give you inferior results, if any, but it can be dangerous too. So we must try to keep our metabolism healthy and efficient.
If you take it too far, however, by eating the wrong foods or eating simply too much, you will eventually overburden your workers no matter how efficient they are, and you can still get those ugly heaps of extra paperwork lying around the desk as would fat around those pesky problem areas. Eating the right amount of healthy food is the key. Ask Google about the Eatwell Plate for a practical guide on what you should be eating and in what quantities.
We see exactly the same syndrome in place when it comes to pursuing a more physically active lifestyle. The common stumbling blocks among people new to exercise are performing too much exercise, performing the wrong type of exercise, or performing it inconsistently.
All these factors similarly place excessive burdens on our workers as the body, unaccustomed to exercise, suddenly must struggle to repair, rebuild and overcompensate. Too much too soon can discourage you or even place you at risk of injury.
The key is progression: slow and gradual in small incremental steps. Put simply, if you are used to nothing, then your first workout should be just a little bit more than nothing.
The next should be a little more than that, and so on. Careful incremental progression gives your workers the opportunity to learn their craft, gain experience and discover the best way of doing things.
The more they do, the better they will get at it.
info@noble-gym.com