Exercise: The Key To Work-Life Balance

  • By: admin
  • May 5, 2014
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You might want to ask your boss to extend your lunch to an hour and a half so you can squeeze a midday workout over at your local personal training studio.

Harvard Business Review published some interesting research assuring us that exercising isn’t some kind of selfish indulgence. It’s actually an asset for work as well as the entire work-life balance.

After conducting a survey of numerous professionals, Russell Clayton, an assistant professor of Management at Saint Leo University, identified a “clear relationship” between exercising and activities and balancing out our work lives and home lives–though many of us don’t always agree with the dichotomy. Summarized, this is Clayton’s point: regularly exercising will make you less likely to feel any conflict between a work and a home life.

Work Life Balance

Work Life Balance

Your physical and psychological state is interconnected with your productivity, and Clayton’s research shows the reasons why: When you are stressed out, exercising helps release some of it. Clayton has observed that the less stress you’re feeling, the more you will tend to enjoy your your office.

Exercising will give you a boost in your self-efficacy. This in turn will boost your confidence to get everything you need, done. People that have high self-efficacy will very likely view the various daily tasks as a challenge that they must master. This point is similar to what one of Clayton’s interview subjects mentioned, one hour of exercising creates an elongated feeling. A personal trainer at a studio can offer some help in motivating you to exercise, helping you out more than any regular gym can.

Clayton also points out that there is no particularly perfect time for exercising. Exercising once waking up helps some people ensure that the day won’t feel overwhelming. Others may use it as a midday workout refresher. Or people may go jogging when they arrive home after work.

The important thing that managers should recognize is that exercising can be a beneficial integration into a workday.
Companies such as Google Inc., Overit Media, Hootsuite and Answerlab, to name a few, have already integrated exercise into their workdays.
If you’re a manager interested in finding a way to integrate exercise in the workday for your staff, an idea we’d suggest is to head over to a professional trainer studio and speak to them about setting up a program that will allow meeting attendees to also workout.

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