Ergonomics…the study of human efficiency at work. What on earth does this have to do with longevity and peak performance?
Well, when you think about it, we spend roughly ⅓ of our time on earth at work. This has the potential to profoundly impact our health. And, if your neck, back, mojo (or anything else) is messed up because of your job, there’s absolutely no way you’ll ever achieve peak performance in athletics, fitness, or other areas of life.
That’s why I created The Healthy Workstation. It’s a comprehensive ergonomics course that stems from my decades of experience doing organizational consulting, jobsite analysis, and workplace wellness programming. The Healthy Workstation is exclusively available in The Lifetime Athlete App and it is the most affordable and effective offering of its type.
Subscribers in the app have unlimited access to the course content. It is organized in easy to understand sections with video lessons that empower the user with actionable knowledge. The course not only helps you to remove undesired effects from your workstation, it actually makes your job work for (not against) your health. Remove fatigue, pain, and stress from the workday and enhance recovery, well-being, productivity, and enjoyment. Good stuff indeed.
Here’s a brief overview of the key considerations in The Healthy Workstation.
- The Basis of Optimized Ergonomics: From a mechanical sense as well as a behavioral one, we need to accomplish two major objectives.
- Make the work fit the worker.
- Make the worker more fit for the work.
- The Relationship of Health to Work Participation: Comprehensive wellness is indeed multifactorial. What happens at work can significantly affect our health. Our relative level of health is a determining factor in our ability to perform at work. In our TLA 5-3-1 system, this synergy must be optimized for best outcomes in fitness, longevity, etc.
- The Role of Posture in Tissue Durability: There is no one perfect posture and it is by no means static. But understanding a tissue stress model, or how biomechanics affect physiology, is critical in addressing the metabolic effects of body alignment.
- The Ideal Seated Workstation: Sitting isn’t necessarily the “new smoking,” and it can be utilized appropriately with good workstation design and practices.
- Standing Workstations: Stand-up desks and related setups offer a positional alternative and movement opportunities. But they need to be put together correctly.
- Activity and Exercise for Work Performance: Moving through the workday, and performing simple exercises, can improve circulation and relieve inflammation-causing overload.
- Workflow Habits and Behaviors: The manner in which we perform our work can simultaneously increase productivity/output and comfort/satisfaction.
Improving the health-related aspects of workstations is a worthy endeavor in and of itself. But doing so in pursuit of better fitness or athletic performance is next-level thinking. In a health-first model, it’s getting things right so that there are no detractors putting the brakes on your progress. In this manner we’re not really being “sneaky,” we’re just using advanced methods to make sure everything is in place to live our best lives. That’s my objective and I’m convinced you’ll find that optimized ergonomics can enhance every area of your life. Everything is interrelated and we can’t separate one thing from another, no matter how hard we may try.
As I mentioned at the beginning, The Healthy Workstation is available in The Lifetime Athlete App. We drop a new course every quarter. You’ll also find courses on nutrition and body composition, sport-specific training, injury management, and more. I’m currently working on more content and have over a dozen new courses slated for future release.
The Lifetime Athlete App also provides all of TLA’s resource (over 1,000 articles, videos, and podcasts) and service (coaching and consultation) offerings right at your fingertips. And, the daily workout programming for the Training Tribe, based on an Annual Training Plan designed to help the evolving human maximize performance and longevity, is an exclusive membership feature. This not only includes workouts but daily tips and notifications, weekly masterclasses and challenges, and an inclusive, engaging, interactive community. It’s for anyone who wants to be the best version of themselves, all the way to the end.
As you can see, ergonomics is just a part of what we do. It’s one of the 5 Components of Lifelong Health, along with food, movement, sleep, and awareness. We make sure we get those things right before we dive into the 3 Essential Elements of Peak Performance (training, recovery, mindset). It’s certainly not madness but it is a proven method.