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The Office Workout: Bodyweight Exercises You Can Do At The Office

By Dale Andrew

One of my favorite movies is Office Space. If you’ve seen it, you know that it’s a pretty hilarious movie about a guy named Peter Gibbons that hates his office job. As he says in the movie, “People were not meant to sit at cubicles staring at a computer screen all day.”

This couldn’t be more true. However, many people do. They sit in traffic during long commutes to and from work. Then, they sit at work for up to 14 hours or more. Go to bed and repeat. Certainly, this sort of daily routine offers little in the way of physical activity.

What’s worse is that sitting all day can create some serious muscular imbalances. When certain muscles are tight for prolonged periods of time, their opposing muscles are often weakened as a result. Think of your muscles as an elastic band. If you stretch it too much or too often, the band loses some of it’s elasticity. Muscles work in a similar way. If one muscle is tight, the opposing muscle is being stretched. If it’s overstretched for too long, it will be weakened as a result.

Tight hips, hamstrings, chest, and front deltoids are not that unusual for the office worker that spends most of his or her day sitting and leaning forward typing. As I said before, where there’s tightness, you can count on areas of weakness. Weak glutes, quads, and rear deltoids are common. In particular, most office workers spend their day with their shoulders internally rotated, which tightens the chest and weakens the rear delts and rotator cuff. One way this can be assessed is the “pencil test.” Get your client to hold a pencil in each hand, extend their arms out to their sides parallel to the ground with palms facing downwards. Then, get them to close their eyes and let their arms drop to their sides. Do the points of the pencils point straightforward or towards each other? The more they point inwards, the greater the imbalance.

Why’s this important?

Well, I’ve seen plenty office workers that join a gym and start training like they don’t work at an office at all – at least for a while. Ignoring these imbalances often makes them worse. The greater the muscular imbalance is, the more potential there is for injury. Without strengthening the muscles and removing some of the physical imbalances that plague the office worker, you’re probably going to end up in a physiotherapist’s office in the next month or so. So what can you do about it?

Well, before you’re ready for more advanced strength training exercises, I recommend short bodyweight strengthening and stretching circuits that can be done at the gym or during your day at the office. Bodyweight exercises help keep the body limber and the mind focused. They might not have the appeal of fancy “whiz-bang” machines, but bodyweight exercises have a valuable, if underrated, role in the fight against fat. In fact, many bodyweight exercises will help you build a better body faster than expensive muscle-isolation equipment at commercial gyms.

You’re really only limited by your imagination when it comes to bodyweight exercises, but I tend to look at training the body in terms of movement patterns, rather than the traditional bodybuilder body part training splits. The reason for this should be self-evident: With few exceptions, office workers are not bodybuilders. Thus, when designing programs to "activate" the correct muscle groups and prepare you for future, more advanced workouts, I’m sure to incorporate hip-dominant, quad-dominant, horizontal pushing, horizontal pulling, vertical pushing, vertical pulling, and rotational movements into each workout routine.

The key as always is systematic progression. Generally, there are almost always four ways to make a particular exercise harder and four more ways to make it easier. It’s really just a matter of matching the exercise with your current ability, then moving up through the levels to more advanced exercises as you get in better shape. So, lets look at 3 sample office bodyweight workout circuits, moving from basic to more advanced, that can be performed anywhere:

Circuit #1:

Circuit #2:

Circuit #3

These are just a couple of examples of what you can do. The possibilities are endless, but the common thread in my program design is that they follow my colleague Craig Ballantyne’s bodyweight circuit guidelines. The first three exercises in each circuit are used to warm-up the body for the more challenging exercises. You then perform 6 main exercises, alternating between lower and upper body exercises for a cardio effect, finishing with a couple of ab exercises. Now you could do a couple giant circuits where you go through all the exercises without rest, or you could break it up as follows: 2 sets of warm-up exercises, 1-3 sets of the six main exercises, and finish with 2 sets of the ab exercises.

Office Bodyweight exercises will not only help to address common muscular imbalances, but with these powerful circuits you can lose fat as well.

About the Author:

Dale Andrew, M.A. is a fitness professional, author, and speaker. He is the fat loss expert busy professionals worldwide turn to for advice on how to build a better body - FAST. To get your copy of his free e-book 64 Must-Have Fitness Tips, visit www.better-body-tips.com.