Work Daze: Working out while working up the org chart

Bob Goldman 

Ever feel you’re working with a bunch of dumbbells?

You don’t know the half of it.

According to “The Hottest New Office is the Gym,” a recent article by Anne Marie Chaker in The Wall Street Journal, posh gyms are adding cubicles and privacy booths to their Nautilus Ab Crunchers and Stairmaster StepMills, making the hottest office space in town also the sweatiest.

It’s all about coworking spaces — places that are not the{mprestriction ids="1,3"} official office you don’t want to go to and not the home office you’re sick of.

There are formal co-working spaces popping up in empty downtown buildings all across America. These communal workspaces allow you to work next to a horde of certifiable weirdos, thus providing an authentic office experience. There are also informal coworking spaces like coffee shops, libraries and the waiting room at your psychiatrist’s office.

While all these coworking spaces have their advantages and disadvantages — just try to get a librarian to serve you a rose petal beetroot latte — none of them make it possible to recover from a convo with your dead-head boss by doing a super-set of Romanian dead lifts, or to celebrate your failure to rise up in the company with a vigorous hour of working hard and getting nowhere on an elliptical trainer.

On the negative side of the ledger, working where you work out can be expensive. For audit manager Jessica DiGiovanna, the cost of her gym-adjacent office space is $499 a month. Pricey, yes, but it is “scented with notes of bergamot.”

I’ll pause here while you ask your company’s facilities manager to add a note of bergamot to your office space. When they finish laughing, we can continue.)

For DiGiovanna, working at her gym “lets her toggle between self-care and her job.” If you like a good toggle, but don’t want to shell out for a gym membership, ask your manager to bring exercise equipment into your office. Normally, a company would balk at the cost of putting full-cage power racks in the conference room or replacing the marketing department with a Zumba studio, but with management completely moo-moo-goo-goo about getting their employees back to the office, the concept could receive a warm welcome.

In the meantime, here are three strategies to balance the mental wear and tear of your job with the joy of building yourself up to Hulk-like proportions, all without ever leaving your desk.

No. 1: Give meetings a power lift.

If a long meeting is destroying your brain cells, build muscle mass by using your laptop for a super set of hammer curls and suitcase squats. Afraid you’ll look weird? Don’t worry. No one ever pays attention to you in meetings. Why should they start now?

No. 2: Step class is not just for lunch anymore.

Don’t ruin a perfectly good lunch hour going to fitness classes. The wasted hours between 9 and 12 and 1 to 5 are perfect for intense combat workouts in the parking lot. This high-intensity workout, with its emphasis on martial-arts moves, kicking and punching, is the perfect preparation for a meeting with the HR Department.

No. 3: Make a place for Pilates.

Why sit at a desk and watch your muscles atrophy when you could be strapping yourself into a reformer? This basic piece of equipment is the heart of any Pilates workout and is sure to generate respect from your coworkers when they see you doing your sales projections while hanging upside-down. Get your manager strapped in and you’ve got a captive audience to pitch your next promotion and the big, fat raise that goes with it. If your manager will not commit, tickle them until they agree.

Remember: Gyms are not the only coworking spaces available. Do you have a community pool in your town? If you bring your laptop and your floaties, you can work away while practicing your frog kick. Or punch in bright and early at a nearby bowling alley. The cacophony of bowling balls rolling down alleys and crashing into bowling pins may not be conducive to getting work done, but it will keep you from falling asleep.

And what about working at a movie theater? Your local multiplex has been empty since COVID-19 and I’m sure management would make you a deal that includes a front-row seat and a breakfast tub of popcorn. Best of all, you could get your work done while watching “Barbie” over and over and over again. Your manager might not approve, but Ken would.

Bob Goldman was an advertising executive at a Fortune 500 company. He offers a virtual shoulder to cry on at bob@bgplanning.com.

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