28 Aug Walking Out Of the Office: A Great Idea!

This week we’ve put together a short blog about walking. It’s something we all do out of necessity but we don’t often do it more that we need to, and we certainly don’t often think about it in much depth!

Here are 4 benefits to walking at lunch;

 1: Live Longer and Better

This is the boring (but important) bit. ‘Reduce your risk of heart disease by 30 percent to 40 percent if you do it briskly 3 or more hours a week. Increase your lifespan up to 5 years if you walk 2 or more miles a day’. Walking is one of the best ways to prevent the onset of type 2 diabetes and also helps maintain blood sugar balance for those already suffering this increasingly common disease. If you want to live longer and for that life to altogether more pleasant, you need to get walking.

2: Easy and Inexpensive for Everyone

Exercise can be off-putting if you’re not already in good shape, but it is pretty much the most equal opportunity of all exercising. It requires no equipment. It can be adapted to any level of fitness by changing speed and/or incline. It’s even gentle enough if you’re arthritic.

3: Lower Stress and Improve Creativity

Walking lowers cortisol and so lowers your stress levels. Research shows walkers report feeling less stressed after getting out and moving. This may be because walking gives us time to meditate. We often imagine meditation involves difficult Eastern techniques of hypnosis and needs a lot of time to be set aside. But walking can also be meditative because it gives us truly free time to think and let our minds wander away from work. Especially when you’ve been confined in a tense office, so lunchtime is the perfect time to do it.

If you don’t actually want to switch off from your latest project, remember that walking is a low difficulty activity, so while we engage our physical bodies at a repetitive almost ‘brainless’ level, our minds are freed to work through problems, come up with ideas, replay conversations, plan, hypothesise and discover solutions. Your boss would be proud!

4. Focus on the whole picture 

It’s recommended that older people walk more often because it staves off dementia. This is because our brains respond well to all the various stimuli thrown at us as we walk down the road or through a field. When we drive we tend to get tunnel vision and block out what is around us. When we walk, by contrast, we’re getting the whole picture, noticing every little detail rather than tuning it out. It keeps us mentally alert and quite literally on our toes.

What do you get up to at lunchtimes? Tweet to tell us : https://twitter.com/MantleLtd What does Mantle do when we’re not taking a stroll? Well, we offer serviced offices, virtual office and meeting rooms at our Business Centre in Wokingham, Berkshire ( a very happy and healthy place!). Queries to info@mantleltd.com or call us on 0118 977 8599