Why I Wrote this Book: "Your Job Is Killing You"

Frequent, flexible, and free. That's my motto with Your Job Is Killing: A User's Guide to Sneaking Exercise into Your Work Day. Please read on to enjoy an excerpt from my upcoming third book. It will help you understand why I wrote this book, and how it can help you and your fellow professional sitters to sit less and move more at work. Your very life depends on it. 
(copyright 2019 Amanda Sterczyk, all rights reserved)

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It was an office job that precipitated my career change into the fitness industry. After spending several years at home with my young children, being confined to an office took its toll on my emotional and physical well-being. Endless meetings and conference calls where I felt chained to my chair were the norm. All I wanted to do was get up and go for a walk. In fact, at one point I was reprimanded for spending too much time visiting colleagues’ offices. Even though I was applying a 1980s solution to a 21st century problem, my boss thought my added movement was making me unproductive.
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Do you have a desk-based job? Are you a professional sitter? The knowledge-based economy means that many adults sit at their desks and in meetings for hours at a time every day. Productivity, profit, and professionalism lead people to remain seated at all times. But we're not in an airplane, and there is no turbulence. This physical inactivity is killing us.

This book will help teach you how to sneak “snacks” of exercise and movement into your work day. This is not some “let’s crush it with squats in the boardroom” type of book. It’s not about how to get the most out of your new treadmill desk. And it’s not an exercise manual either. There are plenty of resources available to show you how to exercise at work, including my free online course, “Add Movement at Work.”

With this book, I want to show you that adding stuff to your office to encourage movement is not the most practical or cost-effective solution. Instead, I’ll show you that moving more at work needs to be frequent, flexible, and free. I’ll leave the sweaty, costly, and complex office workouts to others.

If you read my first book, Move More, Your Life Depends On It, you’ll notice some similar content in this book. When Move More was first published, I was often asked, “Who is this book for?” My response was: for anyone who sits too much — for physically inactive office workers, for sedentary older adults, and for anyone who needs to break up the time they spend on their duff.

Regrettably, some of these groups didn’t identify with the message in Move More because they didn’t “see” themselves portrayed in my first book. Hence this updated perspective, which is targeted specifically to professional sitters.