For people with office jobs, staying strong and healthy can be difficult. If one person is sick, the contagion can spread quickly through poorly filtered ventilation systems, community food bags, and casual contact.

The sedentary nature of office jobs doesn’t help. We sit immobile for long periods as our blood thickens and pools in our abdomen and lower extremities. Add in the generally poor nutrition habits of the average American, and it is a wonder that we aren’t all dead before our 40^th birthdays.

I am extremely athletically active, which means I generally don’t have to worry about office-related repetitive-stress injuries, but I am often dehydrated. The fact that I loooove coffee doesn’t help. To counteract this, I try to drink a full glass of water every hour while I am working. This keeps me hydrated and forces me to get up and use the bathroom several times during the day. Before you say “But I don’t wanna go to the bathroom several times a day”, consider: would you rather have the minor inconvenience of frequent bathroom breaks, or have all of the toxins you would otherwise be flushing from your body, sitting around distracting your immune system while the latest round of Mad Cow Disease works its way into your brain?

We are not engineered to do ANYTHING for long periods of time, except walk and sleep. Getting up and moving around puts muscles to work which would otherwise begin to atrophy. When one group of muscles is under-utilized, the tendency is for the opposing group to become stronger, which can lead to repetitive stress injuries. Those knots in your back from sitting at a computer all day? Those are caused by the muscles in the front half of your body constantly pulling because you are hunched over forward while you work.

So drink some water. Get up from your desk more frequently. Take a minute to stretch out and massage the sore muscles. The quantity of time lost by the extra few minutes not at your desk will be offset by the quality of the time spent not being sick, or sore, or having carpal tunnel surgery.