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I'd just like to confirm that if you're noticing the sedentary lifestyle worsening your health, you'll want to get out of it asap. Muscles do wither away from disuse, and hence they stop supporting your posture (for which they are surprisingly important). On top of that, you lose the muscular memory for proper posture and movement, and become constantly hunched instead. Then chronic cramps (tenseness) set in, blocking blood flow and causing nerve stress, which feeds back into the poor posture. Basically it's a cluster failure of factors feeding into each other.

And it's not only posture—if you just browse through topics on general health on Wikipedia (i.e. not acute diseases), you'll notice they're pretty much all linked to exercise. E.g. anti-inflammatory function is linked to muscle work. And of course, you see articles every week saying brain health is dependent on exercise.

Instead of a chiropractor, you might want to consult a physical therapist who can recommend daily exercise and regime for the back. E.g. Nordic walking with sticks, which puts load on upper back and shoulder muscles.

I don't know how others live with just walks to and from work, but for myself I highly doubt that even a couple hours of exercise could offset being propped at the desk for the rest of the day.

For the work hours, you could look into contract work (freelancing), where you could choose your hours and set the rate instead of being locked into the terms of your job. But of course, other considerations also apply.

My morning routine has me alternating daily between a quick 1-2 mile run, and a structured stretching / pushups regime based on a simple "100 pushups" app. During the workday I use a pomodoro-style timer to stand up and walk through a couple rooms at least once an hour. Back pain gone.

Be careful not to overdo it on pushing exercises. Overdeveloping your front deltoid, as well as tight pectoral muscles, can lead to hunched shoulders. Ideally you'd want to offset any pushing based exercise with an equal amount of pulling work.

Band pull aparts with external rotation at the very least!

Consider the possibility that you've engaged in mental gymnastics subconsciously pursuing physical laziness, I catch myself doing this all the time with my computing.

The reality is, you require negligible amounts of time to maintain a reasonable level of phsyical fitness.

How many pushups can you do in a set? Probably so few that it requires less than one minute of time. So why aren't you doing as many pushups as you possibly can every morning before you shower? Well, simply because you don't want to, and are being lazy.

Incorporating a simple stretching and pushup routine to your daily life, once before showering, will have a significant positive impact on your wellness without costing much time.

You can add a pull-up bar to a doorway and adopt a policy of always having to do as many pull-ups as you can whenever you walk past it. I'm assuming you can't do more than one right now, so it takes almost zero time.

> You can add a pull-up bar to a doorway and adopt a policy of always having to do as many pull-ups as you can whenever you walk past it

Yep, it’s much easier to forse yourself to do a pull up then going down on the floor for a push up in my experience too.

In the fitness world this has a name - Greasing the Groove. Basically getting your central nervous system super used to doing this movement so progression, doing more, comes naturally and easily. Super effective method.

What's the end point of that pullup system? I can do about 12 in a row I think.

If I did this policy, by a frequently used door, would I end up overtrained, or would I become so strong in my arms that I could do 30-40 or so when rested? And if so, would my arms become enormous?

I'm asking because I'm somewhat interested in this policy, but....since I already do strength training and can do pullups, I'm not sure where it would lead.

(I guess I could modify it to only do pullups on workout days, 3x per week, but do them everytime I passed on those days)

> If I did this policy, by a frequently used door, would I end up overtrained, or would I become so strong in my arms that I could do 30-40 or so when rested? And if so, would my arms become enormous?

First, overtraining is so hard for someone just doing normal workouts. Second, progression just doesn't work that way. I've been working for a few months towards doing 500 pull-ups in a single workout. I'm at 160 now, and I still can't do 30-40 dead hang pull-ups in one set. Finally, to become enormous you need to eat.

You need to add more weight to grow more muscle (and eat more). If you don’t you’ll just continue to increase your stamina.

A good way to trade tendonitis for marginal improvements in strength

Care to expand? Or just spreading FUD?

As someone who competes in Judo, and as such needs as strong a grip and upper back/shoulders as possible, I have experienced this. It's easy to overtrain pullups/chipups/rows and end up with tennis or golfers elbow, which is not fun, and takes a long time to heal, being a tendon overuse injury. If it progresses to tendonitis, you're in for a lifetime of problems that are very debilitating. Think not being able to grab a dinner plate off a high shelf. Don't treat pullups as something you can just grind. If you grease the groove, only do a quarter to a half to what you can comfortably do, and give yourself a maximum number of sets that you will do during the day. Progress slowly over many months, with proper form and slow reps and no kipping. Don't do anything silly like add "a rep a day", or try to "drain the tank" every time you hit the exercise. Just trying to save someone else the pain. It's surprisingly to override discomfort with willpower and actively destroy your own body

And in my experience, doing hundreds of pushups daily eliminated my chronic wrist pains caused by injuries in my youth (they've both been broken), and has never caused any lasting harm.

Considering we're talking about people who aren't doing any exercise at all for "lack of time", it's somewhat absurd to be muddying the waters talking about the opposite end of the spectrum; overtraining.

The point is to just get off your ass and do some trivial calisthenics every day before you bathe. In the early stages you're only going to be able to do a handful, maybe not even one pull-up without a chair to assist you, you're not going to "overtrain" doing as many as you possibly can in this condition: we're talking about doing very little. It's emphasized because the amount you can do is proportional to how much time it requires, it's practically zero.

In fact, the probable major result is a change in diet because of the brutal feedback attempting to lift your own weight repeatedly every morning can have.

I don't think for most people it's easy to overtrain, but it's certainly possible. Greasing the groove as you describe is much more typically recommended than "as many as possible". Myself, I actually started with a hanging regimen before beginning to work on pullup variations. I agree with most of what you say.

How about looking for a day job that has a quality gym in the building where you can workout and shower during the day?

I'm sure you can find this in SF tech. During your interview process, just make it clear that you value being able to exercise during the day.

It doesn't have to be crazy stuff, even just walking on a treadmill, running, or stretching. It's more important to build the habit of doing anything than doing something crazy.

There is strong evidence that exercise improves learning and memory (personally I feel it improves focus as well) so in my opinion, you don't "lose" this time as you are more effective the rest of the day [0]

[0] http://www.kurzweilai.net/how-exercise-improves-memory

> [0] http://www.kurzweilai.net/how-exercise-improves-memory

Caveat: the proposed mechanism might not work if exercising in an area with significantly polluted air (indoor environments can get really bad if the HVAC isn't designed and maintained properly) [1].

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21708224

Doesn't even have to be in the building, there's gyms you can go to and work out and shower at over lunch or something.

One of my dream projects is finding a way to make software development non-sedentary. In my mind software can be designed around a space. Software can be an interactive system that you design and construct within a known space, maybe even unique to a space. Build your system in a forest, a warehouse, under a bridge... Still vague in my mind, but one day...

Spooky coincidence? Check out this other thread active on HN right now:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18310733

It's about precisely that! A physical room as the interface to a dynamic networked system for executing intuitive, easily-composed programs...

Sounds like you should check out VR. There's not much in terms of development tools yet, due to the low angular resolution of current gen hardware, but once it gets there it could enable what you're talking about.

Definitely will be looking there when I get the opportunity

You can be busy and still get workouts in. Buy a kettle bell, and a pull-up bar. Heck, you don't even need that. You can do bodyweight workouts easily as soon as you get out of bed in the morning.

The big secret (if there is one), is you have to make taking care of your body as much of a priority as your mind or anything else you do. Taking care of your body is also a long term endeavor, which so many people have a hard time seeing. Taking care of your body will likely allow you to contribute to OSS longer into your life than not.

I just mostly give up on pursuing my intellectual passions. I figure I'd rather just live a balanced lifestyle now, save up and early retire, then have all the time I want during the day to pursue my passions. Assuming I'm not too busy raising kids (but even that doesn't last forever)

learn to be passionate about life. Just simply existing, feeling the sinews and subtle sensations of the body can be a great and healthy passion to experience!

Any tips on how to learn this? Seems easier said than done. Sort of like, “just change your personality”.

no its very difficult and takes many years and lots of luck finding a good qigong or authentic yoga teacher! I've heard good things about the inner engineering courses though, less rigorous on the physical body.

Yes. Check out sfmovementpractice.