Take One Step at a Time on Stairs

Posted on 2013/01/012013/01/01 by Jason Hensel

My office is located on the 17th floor of a glass building in Dallas. There are four elevators that can take me to my floor quickly, depending on the time of day. During times that I’m waiting for an elevator’s doors to open, I’ve often considered taking the stairs and walking up all 17 flights to my office. Then, of course, an open elevator appears.

Starting tomorrow, though, I’m walking up those stairs one step at a time. Sure, I can bound up them and reach my floor quicker, but according to recent research in PLoS, taking them one at a time burns more calories.

“The advice to those seeking to utilise stair climbing specifically as a method to control or reduce weight is to ascend stairways one step at a time; more calories are burned through this form of stair climbing,” the study’s authors wrote. “For example, climbing just a 15 m high stairway five times a day represents an energy expenditure of on average 302 kcal per week using the one step strategy and 266 kcal using the two step strategy.”

If you’re using a two-step strategy, you’ll have a much harder and quicker workout, expending more energy. However, if you take one step at a time, you’ll expend less energy but take longer to reach your destination, thus ensuring burning more calories.

What exercise routines are you starting this year?

(h/t to Scientific American. Image via Flickr: Dan Eckert / Creative Commons)

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Micro-Management is My Kryptonite

Posted on 2012/11/202012/11/19 by Jason Hensel

Inc.com recently ran a story titled “10 Leadership Practices to Stop Today,” by Paul Spiegelman. It’s a great piece, and I agree with all 10 recommendations, especially No. 1: “Out: Micro-management, or the need to control every aspect of your company. In: Empowerment, the ability to give your people some rope–even rope to make mistakes without blame.”

Perhaps it’s because I’m a writer, someone who makes his scratch in the creative arts, but micro-management is the Kryptonite to my creativity and productivity. Whenever I’m being micro-managed, I feel less empowered, less trusted, and more like a slave.

In fact, researchers from Harvard Business School and Rice University did a study last year and found that “workers perform just fine when managers don’t keep close tabs on them, and that workers are more likely to be fearful of experimenting when their managers micromanage; as a result, the employees learn less and performance suffers,” as reported by Kimberly Weisul for CBS News.

The struggle for me is knowing how to handle micro-management. Sure, I play along and let managers know everything I’m doing down to the last detail. But I can only allow myself to do that for so long before I become either depressed or angry. Neither of those are good for my health or career.

What does one do? How have you handled micro-managing in your career? How can a lower-level employee convince leadership that a lack of autonomy is stifling creativity, productivity, and a healthy mental state?

(Image via Flickr: ZaCky / Creative Commons)

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Exercise Can Lead to Female Orgasm

Posted on 2012/03/21 by Jason Hensel

Exercising doesn’t thrill me. I tried running four miles one time, and I was in a terrible mood afterwards. The exercise high just eludes me. But not for women.

According to a recent study out of Indiana University, exercise (not including sex or fantasies) can lead to female orgasm.

“The most common exercises associated with exercise-induced orgasm were abdominal exercises, climbing poles or ropes, biking/spinning and weight lifting,” said Debby Herbenick, co-director of the Center for Sexual Health Promotion in IU’s School of Health, Physical Education and Recreation. “These data are interesting because they suggest that orgasm is not necessarily a sexual event, and they may also teach us more about the bodily processes underlying women’s experiences of orgasm.”

Key study findings include:

About 40 percent of women who had experienced exercise-induced orgasms (EIO) and exercise-induced sexual pleasure (EISP) had done so on more than 10 occasions.
Most of the women in the EIO group reported feeling some degree of self-consciousness when exercising in public places, with about 20 percent reporting they could not control their experience.
Most women reporting EIO said they were not fantasizing sexually or thinking about anyone they were attracted to during their experiences.
Diverse types of physical exercise were associated with EIO and EISP. Of the EIO group, 51.4 percent reported experiencing an orgasm in connection with abdominal exercises within the previous 90 days. Others reported experiencing orgasm in connection to such exercises as weight lifting (26.5 percent), yoga (20 percent), bicycling (15.8), running (13.2 percent), and walking/hiking (9.6 percent).

“Magazines and blogs have long highlighted cases of what they sometimes call ‘coregasms,'” Herbenick said. “But aside from early reports by Kinsey and colleagues, this is an area of women’s sexual health research that has been largely ignored over the past six decades.”

Yeah, she just said coregasms. Feel free to use that in your daily conversations.

(Image via Flickr: Dan Machold / Creative Commons)

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