Fitness in the workplace is a necessary tool to keep workers engaged and healthy. Some of the things I am going to lay out and discuss are some ways of instituting fitness in the workplace, the effects of physical activity on people, and the diseases and negatives that can be avoided/prevented by allowing employees to participate in fitness. This especially has greater effect on workers as they are mostly sitting at a desk for the majority of the day. By implanting regimens to help employees it can actually help them, the effects that exercise during work can result in improving the employees mood and/or efficiency at the job. Studies from sources in my paper will demonstrate that physical activity has a very positive effect on people and can improve and lengthen people’s lives. One example of businesses implementing regimens to help their worker’s is the standing desk, it has been known as a positive to get the blood flowing in the body and prevent clots, as most professionals are sitting for eight hours a day. Which is not a healthy thing to do, it is recommended that you stand for 12 hours a day. The studies show that standing for majority of your day is a good and positive thing and that exercise “wakes you up,” and makes one alert in the everyday task, making one more effective. What this paper is trying to show is that physical activity is a positive in people’s everyday lives but more importantly the lives of employees. Fitness in the workplace is a necessary tool to keep workers engaged and healthy.
In the sources I have found, they conducted studies to see some of the diseases and negative effects that could be prevented physical activity, in people’s everyday lives, in other words there it is only a positive by giving people the opportunity and time to actually workout. In the article, they conducted analysis over a study and found that if someone increased fitness activity, that it would reduce a risk to premature death, but the inverse would happen if one decreased physical activity, it would only increase a rick to premature death. They concluded this by grading the effect of physical activity, even small adjustments to a physical regimen would cause a significant reduction in risk. “In one study, participants with the highest levels of physical fitness at baseline and who maintained or improved their physical fitness over a prolonged period had the lowest risk of premature death.” (Warburton Para 7) Now when small changes in someone’s physical activity changed, specifically in one who was previously sedentary, or not that active, they found that it caused big improvements in their health status. “For instance, in another study, people who went from unfit to fit over a 5-year period had a reduction of 44% in the relative risk of death compared with people who remained unfit.” (Warburton Para 7) This study clearly shows that there are really good effects on people, the everyday person can gain a lot, but also workers. Workers tend to be more highly associated as sedentary. By implementing physical activity, they can gain tremendous benefits to their health. The studies conducted in this article specifically were looking at different diseases that are common causes of death to see if there is some correlation between them and being inactive. What was really surprising was that physical inactive, actually put people at a greater risk for cancer. “A systematic review of epidemiologic studies revealed that moderate physical activity was associated with a greater protective effect than activities of less intensity. Physically active men and women exhibited a 30%–40% reduction in the relative risk of colon cancer, and physically active women a 20%–30% reduction in the relative risk of breast cancer compared with their inactive counterparts.” (Warburton Para 16) People should take whatever measures are necessary to help prevent diseases that could kill them, and right now people don’t get what is required to sustain them. Now another study done in Australia conveys that people sit during the day for 50% of the time. In Australia the government currently recommends 150-300 minutes a week of moderate physical activity, but one actually has to do 420 minutes in order to start losing weight. In this study they focused more on the effects of obesity and overweightness. In order to achieve this, they tried to implement workplace physical activities and advise them on nutrition, but also there was a group that started to exercise outside of work, and they compare the results. “After-work participants increased more than in-work participants, with significantly more vigorous PA. Beneficial changes in BMI and aerobic fitness were significant in both intervention groups. Changes in BMI for the after-work participants were greater relative to controls while fitness improvements for the intervention participants exceeded those for the controls” (Burn Para 11) This study shows that there are benefits to implementing physical activity into the workplace, sure they didn’t improve as much as the people who did it outside of work, but then again they probably had less time. Even so, there was improvement in their overall health, people should push for things that don’t interfere with their work but still help them.
I will be going into the effects physical activity has on a person who engages in them and some negatives produced by not participating. This article specifically talks about some effects the physical activity can make on the person both cognitive and mood wise. “Staying active improves mental and cognitive health – which leads to better work performance. Exercise has been shown to slow and reduce the process of cognitive decline by promoting brain cell growth and repair.” (Kohll Para 5) This is a great impact to a person not just in the workplace but in life. If they start losing mental prowess then they start to become less effective in the workplace, yes. Though they also start to show declines and health, this could possibly lead to an early onset of Alzheimer’s. By just staying active and doing small things to stay active you improve your overall mental ability which only helps one in the long and short term. Now in terms of mood the article states, “exercise promotes feelings of well-being and happiness by producing the feel-good chemicals serotonin, dopamine and endorphins.” (Kohll Para 6) Improving mood effects not just the one person, it affects everyone around that person, if someone is gloomy or crotchety, that wouldn’t help workplace situations, it would only make them worse and that one person would slow productivity. If the person is happier, that person would be more involved and actually produce positives in the workplace. This study goes more into the negative effects of not being physically inactive workplace, “The total reported time spent sitting per day (across all domains) was almost 6 h less among the mothers than the workers (P<0.001), and compared with the mothers, a significantly greater proportion of the workers was classified as overweight or obese.” (Brown Para 3) These results show big negatives as being overweight or obese leads to certain predispositions to diseases, discussed earlier. These are also serious things, as this could also affect an employee’s mood if they think negatively about themselves and the weight. It only serves as a benefit to letting people in the workplace do physical activities, in order to improve their overall mood, productivity and health.
I am now going to go into how some experts are recommending implementing physical activities into the workplace. Now according to Alan Kohll, who is a contributor to Forbes, he mostly covers corporate wellness and health trends. He states that two ways to get employees to start doing physical activity or for companies to implement them are to use fitness trackers and health clubs. People are creatures of habit they aren’t going to necessarily change just because someone told them to even if it is something as serious has their own health. So Mr.Kohll states “offer a prize for the winning employee and a small prize for all participants in the challenge.” (Kohll Para 8) People are driven by incentives in life and especially in work, if they are given something just by exercising, it doesn’t matter if they are like exercising all that matters are winning and getting the prize. For the company to take the investment into buying these it is worth it, for one that could write this off as it is a company expense that benefits employees and helps keep them productive. Which in turn would be very valuable to the company because if they are more productive than the company wins because the employees are doing better work. Now as for health clubs it is more to the point earlier in the essay, if one allows employees to gather outside of work as a group it is more beneficial to allow participating. This is actually a trend occurring in the corporate world, bosses allowing employees to take walking breaks, some companies might even give incentives for these as well. As this is still a plus for the companies the workers productivity only improves which in turn helps the company. Moreover, a study conducted in the workplace found that employees for participated in company backed programs like walking groups and counseling increased their step count. “Participants assigned to the workplace walking programme increased their step counts by over 968 steps at the end of the intervention. Participants given encouragement to increase their workplace walking also demonstrated an increase of over 699 steps.” (Malik Para 25) This concludes that workers that participated in the workplace activities increased their steps and physical activity which in turn is a great benefit to them. Both sources showed ways that companies can intervene in helping their employees and showed that there are big positives in implementing these.
Physical activity brings plenty of benefits, it prevents very deadly diseases, improves mood and productive and companies that don’t implement it only harm themselves. Without physical activity to stimulate the employees it would only affect companies as the employee production would go down and employee’s health would be at risk, keeping them from doing work. Employers have some easy ways to get people involved in fitness, by instituting health clubs and giving employees fitness trackers, these could also be back up with incentives to motivate employees to get healthy. Implementing physical activity is only a plus to companies, and only it is a necessity, all the studies I have read seem to pinpoint work as a great avenue to expand people’s fitness. Because people spend so much time sitting when they could use that time or be given short breaks to get them physically active. What is important is getting people physically active, it will prevent more negatives, and create more positives and create better working environments.