Exercise Your Right to Exercise: 3 Gadgets That Can Help
As a lawyer, you're a champion for your client -- so you've got to be in fighting shape. Also, as a lawyer, you're hunched over a desk all day, fighting the battle of the bulge. If you are dealing with either one of these challenges, here are some gadgets to make exercise more doable.
The Striiv Smart Pedometer
This is more than a fancy pedometer -- it's a game that appeals to all the typical lawyer character traits: competitiveness, acquisitiveness, idealism, argumentativeness. Okay, not argumentativeness; you can't debate with it (next version?), but there's a lot about this pedometer that makes it almost addictively motivating.
- Nothing spices things up like a bit of friendly rivalry. With the Striiv, you can compete against your friends or against cute computer characters as you walk races and earn points.
- Earn points, did I say? Yes! It's not money, but you still get to buy stuff. There are a couple colorful islands you can buy as well as animals and plants to put in them. And the plants ... earn more points! It's as if the sweet lovechild of Farmville and Monopoly is encouraging you to get fit.
- For the idealistic among us, your walking also earns donations that provide clean water, protect the rain forest or vaccinate a child against polio. And, for the only semi-idealistic among us, you never have to choose between earning cool virtual game stuff and helping people in real life. Corporate partners take care of paying for the donations, so all you have to do is walk.
Another thing about this pedometer: it reads your mind! For example, you could be ready to stop after winning your 500-step race against the penguin, but then a window might pop up offering you 2,000 extra points just for dancing around for another two minutes. As for me, I can't resist a bargain. I must have lost ten pounds with this thing. Maybe it even made me a better attorney.
A Treadmill Desk
According to The New York Times, exercise doesn't just make your healthier, it makes you smarter and actually improves the structure of the brain over time by making your hippocampus bigger. Stomach smaller, brain bigger; what's not to love? Looking for an immediate benefit? According to Forbes, a treadmill desk increases productivity.
Nature never anticipated the modern lawyer's typical workday of high stress combined with being nearly stationary at a computer for hours at a time. A treadmill desk takes a couple months to adjust to, but people do adjust and end up being more productive. It's about the closest we can get to spending our days the way nature intended us to.
Treadmill desks also don't have to be as expensive as people think. LifeSpan has a number of treadmill desks ranging from about $1,200 to $2,000 on Amazon, all of them with high ratings.
Whole Body Vibration (WBV)
Do you refuse to exercise? Too tired? No time? No judgments here, just a cool gadget: the whole body vibration platform. You stand on it; it jiggles. You don't have to do anything. Believe it or not, it's been proven to increase bone mineral density and leg strength. And strong bones and legs can put you on the path to where you'll actually be wanting to walk and even do other exercise.
Please Join the Conversation
What do you do to keep in shape? It can be hard to start a habit of exercise -- what tips would you offer to someone who's having a hard time? And do you have any cool exercise gadgets you think would especially appeal ("appeal" -- see what we did there?) to lawyers? Tell us all about it (or complain about the pun) on Facebook!
Related Resources:
- Treadmill Desks: Healthy or Hype For Sedentary Lawyers? (FindLaw's Greedy Associates)
- Standing Desks are Good for Productivity. And Billing Hours Nonstop (FindLaw's Greedy Associates)
- Strive Pedometers (Amazon)