Posts Tagged ‘anylinuxwork fitness’

Exercise and be a smarter engineer!

Monday, April 9th, 2012

BEAUTY with brains may still be an unrealistic combination but exercise and brains are definitely connected. A new research conducted at the University of Hamburg, Germany and published in the Health Psychology comes as a good news for middle aged men and women who haven’t yet bothered about their physical fitness. The study suggests that if they start exercise now, they can still save their brains from becoming totally exhausted in their senior years.

As many as 68 inactive men and women aged between 40 and 56 were divided into two categories: the cycling group and the stretching group. In the meantime, the study also observed 18 non-active people who were to be compared with the studied group.

Before the assignment, a few tests were conducted including heart fitness test, measurement of memory and other thinking skills. The studied group did these physical exercises for two hours weekly for six months.

The hypothesis was that in late adulthood, a region of the brain involved in memory, the hippocampus, shrinks. While the cycling group’s heart fitness was improved by 15%, there were not many changes on this count among the stretching and inactive groups. But when a memory test of learning a list of items was conducted, both the cycling and the stretching groups did better than the inactive group. The increase in this test score was linked with an increase in fitness. Moreover, it turned out that the cycling group also did better in the recognition test of retaining learned material.

Also, there was a surprise finding. Both the groups were given a paper and pencil test in which they had to find and mark certain letters quickly. The stretching group actually improved more in a test of attention than did the cycling group.

Quite a few studies previously have also suggested a clear connection between exercising and brain power. This should particularly interest people in the IT industry as they constantly lose out on the exercising front due to work pressures. Ironically, this lack of physical exercise affects their brain power in the long run as they struggle to get to the top ladder of hierarchy in their company.

Stretching is something that Team ALW has been practicing right in the office premises through Office Yoga. We have pictures of Office Yoga exercises pinned in each of the employee areas so that people may find time during the entire day for some stretching. And now with this study, we are all the more encouraged to motivate our team to continue doing so.

Cycling is also something that we have been contemplating to encourage our team with. It is an exercise that can actually improve our heart’s fitness. Heart is an important health parameter and is related to the overall fitness of a person. What is interesting is that the targeted group was exercising and cycling only for two hours per week. Imagine if an engineer is able to take out only half an hour every day for cycling or exercising. It can have a wonderful impact on his brain power and overall fitness.

Missed exercise at home? Never mind!

Friday, April 15th, 2011

Oh hell, I missed my swimming class again! And there goes the sigh and with it a growing frustration on the increasing tummy. But that is not how we, at AnyLinuxWork, begin our day. We never mind if we missed our swimming class. We forget it if we woke up late and could not exercise. There’s always another way to make up for the loss. And the another way begins right from the Green Tea with which we begin a typical work day at AnyLinuxWork.

Wait, that’s just one part of our healthy work –life-style. We give our team mates a chance to compensate for some extra calorie that they couldn’t burn back home. We follow some very simple steps of exercising right at our office so that we keep fit despite missing our usual exercise regime. Here’s how.

AnyLinuxWork Team is creative when it comes to exercising at work place. We channelize our naughty minds towards devising clever ways to finding time for some ‘office exercise’. Whenever our HR guy Ravi is not carrying loads of office paper bundles, he makes it a point to take the stairs and not the lift. Isn’t that simple? Some of us park our vehicles deliberately further away so that walking around the office premises is a way to reach the cabin.

You can also follow some of our tricks that we religiously follow every day at ALW premises so as to keep fit. For instance:

• Use mobile phone to set an alarm every hour that reminds you to stand up and go to the water tank. Have a glass full of water and come back. That way, you give your body a little physical activity every hour and prevent yourself from dehydration by having a glass full of water on an hourly basis. Water is great for skin too.
• Instead of asking office boys to deliver documents to colleagues, carry them yourselves.
• Instead of having the 4 pm tea inside your cabin, walk up to the pantry and have it. Roam about a bit while having it.
• When someone calls on your mobile phone, walk-the-talk. That is, talk while walking instead of sitting.
• Always leave your lunch box in your car or scooter. Then run for it as the lunch bell rings. That way, you would have also helped a bit of your appetite.

In addition to this, Team ALW has been doing stretching exercises for almost a year now. These exercises include stretching using a chair and office table. We do this stretching almost every hour for a few minutes. This habit keeps us alert and prevents sleep while working. This is the reason why most of the times our employees look energetic and active. AnyLinuxWork has also been conducting a lot of activities to make sure its employees are healthy and physically active. We organize trekking expeditions from time to time. We begin our day with Office Yoga. We counsel employees about healthy diet and implement the same in our canteen.

As part of its commitment towards physical fitness, AnyLinuxWork is soon launching a fitness portal by the name of MeriFitness which is going to be a one-of-a-kind website for fitness enthusiasts. The portal is being launched in an international business technology event CeBIT Australia 2011 in May this year.