Every hour give me 80 seconds of one of these nine exercises to help with weight loss and get your blood flowing for increased mental focus.
Weight loss: Tim Ferriss claims that eighty seconds is the magic number when it comes to the Minimal Effective Dose (MED) of muscular contraction to help “push” calories into the muscles instead of being stored as fat. I say aim for 90 because it’s 1.5 minutes and easier to set your timer. The timing of these muscular contractions is also a key component in making the most efficient weight loss effort. But when do you do these exercises? According to Ferriss, blood sugar was highest for about an hour and a half after a meal. The best time is immediately prior to eating and again at an hour and a half after the meal – especially a cheat meal. And by the way, any large-muscle-group exercise will suffice for eighty seconds or a group of smaller muscle groups will work as well. The exercises I chose here are mostly lower body and core because they can be done near your work station or desk in the office with ease.
Mental Focus: Exercise improves working, short term, and long term memory. It improves the ability to switch plans, decreases distractions, improves reading comprehension and analysis enhances creativity. Dr. John Ratey, author of “Spark – The Revolutionary New Science of Exercise and the Brain” says that exercise improves your brain in the short term by raising your focus for two to three hours afterward. Regular, moderately intense exercise maintains healthy blood pressure and weight, helps you feel more energetic, lifts your mood, lowers stress and anxiety, and keeps your heart healthy. Raising your heartbeat sends blood and oxygen to the brain, but other changes happen, too. A lot of research suggests that exercising moderately and regularly stimulates brain regions involved in memory function to release a chemical called brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF).
This is a simple strategy that will help more for the weight loss than the mental focus because the exercise benefit requires a bit more time for the BDNF to really help with focus, but the idea here is that it will help you focus more than you sitting at your desk yawning and getting distracted. Getting some blood flow and heart rate up will help you to re-focus and be more productive and if you actually do this every hour then you will achieve the weight loss benefit without having to time it before or after your meal since you’ll be doing it all day. If you do not want to do this every hour then try every other hour or plan around eating times or when you start to get distracted or frustrated with work.
The action plan:
Every 60 minutes do 90 seconds of continuous repetitions of one of these exercises, the next hour complete a different exercise. I give you an estimate of repetitions in case you do not want to time the exercises just do the estimated rep count instead.
- Squats – (45 squats)
- Alternating leg raises – (90 raises)
- Good mornings – (45 reps)
- Russian twists – (90 twists)
- Standing side leg raises – (30 per side)
- Toe touch crunches – (60 crunches)
- Calf raises – (60 raises)
- Stationary Lunges – (20 per leg)
- Front Elbow Plank – Reg/on knees (90 seconds)
If you want to do mini-workouts here are 9 workouts you can do each hour instead of a single exercise. For these do 1 set of 15 reps per exercise and 30 seconds on the planks.
| Workout 1 | Squats |
| alternating leg raises | |
| Russian twists | |
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| Workout 2 | Good mornings |
| Standing leg raises | |
| Toe touch crunches | |
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| Workout 3 | Stationary Lunges |
| Calf Raises | |
| Front Elbow Plank |
| Workout 4 | Good mornings |
| Calf Raises | |
| Russian twists | |
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| Workout 5 | Squats |
| Standing leg raises | |
| Front Elbow Plank | |
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| Workout 6 | Stationary Lunges |
| alternating leg raises | |
| Toe touch crunches |
| Workout 7 | alternating leg raises |
| Toe touch crunches | |
| Front Elbow Plank | |
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| Workout 8 | Squats |
| Good mornings | |
| Stationary Lunges | |
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| Workout 9 | Standing leg raises |
| Calf Raises | |
| Russian twists |
If you want some more bodyweight workouts you could also check out my 28 Day Challenge program that has 24 unique bodyweight workouts with 6 exercises each. Have fun with this as I know that a desk job can be a challenge to lose weight and distractions are increased when working from home. You just have to be determined to achieve results!