It’s been a while since I last blogged about occupational health – probably because it’s not all that exciting 🙂 But as I’ve learned more about recovery, both through school and by messing around with devices like the Whoop and the OmegaWave, I’ve started to look more closely at my other day to day activities in an effort to try and determine what impact they have and, of course, how I can do better!

Last week I asked one of the trainers who works as part of our health & wellness program at Intel (well, she works for Exos who we are lucky enough to have running the program) come into our staff meeting and talk to the team about the importance of moving around and stretching while working. We’re a bunch of software engineers so for the most part if we’re not interrupted by something or someone, we’ll get lost at the keyboard for hours and hours! We covered some cool tennis ball pressure point relief work and you can read some more in one of the Exos blogs but it was this topic that got me thinking about how my work habits affect my workout and recovery habits and then a few things started clicking for me…

I’ve mentioned in previous posts that I get asked a few of the same questions quite often:

• Do you actually have a job? (because I’m at the gym so much)
• How can you train with so much volume and intensity so consistency?

And it’s true, I do train pretty hard and between lifting weights, HIIT classes, trail running, dedicated stretching/recovery sessions I’m in the area of 10-12 hours of exercise per week. With my trainer’s (aka my training partner’s) help I keep things mixed up pretty good though, I’m always doing something different. That’s part of it for sure but circling back to the workplace, there’s something else…

I recently enjoyed a wonderful perk that Intel still offers (thank goodness), the sabbatical! We get an extra 8 weeks of paid time off every 7 years and that’s on top of 4 weeks of paid vacation. So, this year I took 10 weeks off in a row starting in Feb and actually got to intern at my gym which was a blast! Anyway, what does that have to do with anything? Well, it turns out I’m not the Man of Steel after all! Not too far into sabbatical, it became obvious to my trainer, and after a little while longer I accepted it too, that I was overtraining. Not an easy pill to swallow especially since I didn’t think I had really added a whole lot of volume or intensity with my extra time off. Well, I may have added an extra hour or two per week starting in Jan, but still…

Now I can finally tie these last couple of paragraphs together. When I look back and really think about my day to day activities pre-sabbatical, during sabbatical, and now that I’m back at work one thing really jumps out at me – especially since I have the Whoop band to back it up with data. When I wasn’t working, instead of spending my non-gym time sitting in front of the computer, I was up and around doing things around the house, running errands, etc. During a regular work week I’m either sedentary or I’m 100% all-out at the gym. That’s it! My job is a key part to both my exercise and my recovery because (1) since I work from home and live about 2 miles from my gym, I can easily afford to go twice a day and (2) when I’m not working out I’m pretty much relaxing, well physically at least. How crazy is that?! To the earlier point about stretching at the workplace – I’m not at all advocating that long periods of sitting in front of a computer should be part of anyone’s recovery protocol. When I’m coding, I don’t just sit for ours on end. I get up at least once an hour and move around, foam roll, stretch, eat a healthy snack, go to the gym for a 3rd time, whatever it takes to say loose 🙂

I guess the whole point of this post is to point out how everything you do on a day-day basis plays a role in your ability to perform at whatever level you want to be at. You can’t just focus on diet and exercise alone if you either trying to get better/faster/stronger or simply trying to figure out why you might be in a rut!