A friend of mine sends out a weekly invitation to her mailing list to join her aquafit class. “Fight Office Butt!” she admonishes. (Okay, she doesn’t use the word “butt,” but this is a family program.)
Yes, we send too much time sitting on our assets in front of a computer. This can be a sedentary life (if not actually, glacially, sedimentary) and we can probably use a little more activity. So says Gamercize, a U.K. company that’s marketing the GZ PC-Sport & Power Stepper.
The unit, essentially a small step machine, fits under a workstation, but that’s not where it ends, according to the company Web site. The unit motivates more activity by, for example, disabling the mouse and keyboard after too much inactivity, forcing you to get going again to get your work done. It analyzes your physical performance and reports on how well you’re doing. A personal trainer program is available by subscription.
(I saw Woody Allen’s Bananas recently, which opens with Woody’s Fielding Mellish hard at work at his day job, demonstrating an exercise suite that allows busy executives to get a workout while at their desks. It’s a marvellous example of Allen’s seemingly lost talent for physical comedy; but since I couldn’t find the clip on YouTube, I’ve linked to the hysterical, though completely irrelevant, courtroom scene instead.)
