Fit to work: Why it pays to be active during office hours

With 54% of workers overweight, companies are being encouraged to promote fitness in sedentary staff. Sharon Ni Chonchuir talks to Prof Neil Moyna who’s heading up this workplace fitness challenge.

Professor Niall Moyna, head of the School of Health and Human Performance at DCU; Jim Dowdall, MD Irish Life Health; Dr Sarah Kelly, exercise physiologist and DCU lecturer; and former rugby great Gordon D’Arcy at the beginning of the Irish Life Health ‘Urban Hiking’ trail, encouraging workers to embrace their urban surroundings as the perfect environment for exercise as they launched 2017 Irish Life Health Workplace Fitness Challenge. Picture: Naoise Culhane.

ARE you sitting comfortably? Considering most of us spend up to nine hours a day sitting down, it’s quite likely that you are.

Like Homer Simpson, most of us start our days sitting in the car as we drive to work. There, we sit at desks except for when we have to sit through meetings. A growing number of us even eat lunch sitting in front of our computers.