Denise Austin works at MSP

by nancycopen

Have you read the articles about squeezing in a quick workout and thought yeah, right, I don’t have time for that? When Denise Austin recently appeared in an article in the Washington Post about the importance of getting up from your desk every few hours and move around, one person got inspired. Jon, our Senior Graphics Designer, mentioned this and got us started with the idea of taking Denise Austin’s advise to do some jumping jacks. Upping the challenge, I said “let’s do push-ups”.

So now a couple weeks later, our workout group has expanded to 11 MSP staff committed to taking a mid-morning and mid-afternoon exercise break. A quick break in the morning is great to get you going after the caffeine has worn off and the afternoon break heads-off that 3pm lull.

We have a few simple exercises that everyone can do at their own personal level and its just competing against yourself, not what anyone else is doing. What’s exciting to see is that we all have different strengths in our workouts. Who knew that tiny, little Penny (the oldest of our workout group, and I say that with all due respect) can hold a plank position for 3 minutes! Try it. If you’ve never done it you’ll be lucky to hold plank for 45 seconds.

Each of has a different motivation too. Julie B. has an upcoming wedding and wants buff arms in her bridesmaid gown. Jamie’s kids called him out on the ‘dad gut’ and Jon – well, he’s got 5 kids to keep up with so he needs lots of energy. Beth, a regular workout guru anyway has this as just a little extra strength training and of course it’s encouraging to see the boss get on the floor and do pushups with the rest of us. No excuses if the boss is doing it, right?

Much like our work environment, we all have different strengths and motivations that we bring with us and the teamwork of encouraging each other carries us further as a team than what we could do individually.

Almost time for push-ups.

And if you’re wondering what exercises we do, we do push-ups, plank, ab crunches and lunges.

This entry was posted on April 23, 2012 at 10:19 am and is filed under Office Culture. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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