I hate gyms. At their best, I'll stick a podcast on, hook myself up to a machine, and do a circuit of resistance training to follow. If it's a good podcast, I will have learned something, but I don't think they're interesting, and I don't think they're real exercise. I also don't think that one burst of exercise is as healthy (or feels as good) as spreading exercise throughout the day. I've never been good about building them into my routine.

My career and livelihood also demands that I sit in front of a computer all day, at high levels of alertness. This isn't a recipe for good health, and it's not uncommon (although, I think, less common now!) to see laptop warriors swigging at soda or chugging a Red Bull to keep their energy up. I don't want to be that guy, and the two to three cups of coffee I drink a day already worry me.

I grew up in Oxford, a town where walking is easy; it was as fast to walk the two miles into the city center from my house as it was to catch the bus. So I learned to walk everywhere - something I continued to do when I moved to Edinburgh, and something I still try and do here in the US. It's harder here, even in cities like San Francisco; in some parts of America it's actually a kind of taboo to walk instead of take the car. I hear there's also some kind of obesity epidemic these same places. I'm shocked.

Walking everywhere - six miles or more a day, according to Fitbit - has always been my number one form of exercise. Here, I have to be a bit more careful about it. My work is based in Austin (I'm the outlier here in the Bay Area), and don't have an official office, so I could just pay for something that suited me; I chose Local Office, a perfectly-placed spot in West Berkeley that meant I automatically had a 3 mile walk built into my day. I took another hour to stroll around for lunch, and I had my six miles. This last year, I started to build in other forms of exercise; sometimes, when nobody was in the office and I was at a stopping point on whatever I was working on, and nobody else was around, I'd drop and do 20 push-ups. By the time the office closed, I'd worked my way up to 100 a day. (And lost over 15 pounds.)

Local Office is sadly gone. These days I often work out of RockIT Colabs, a coworking / maker space (they have an office upstairs, 3D printers and welding stations downstairs) right on the edge between Chinatown and the Financial District in downtown San Francisco. The community is perfect for me, but even factoring in my BART ride from Berkeley, the exercise isn't quite there. For some reason, I've also lost my habit of jumping up from my desk and walking around or doing some intensive exercise whenever I hit a stopping point. (The ability to drop and do some exercise with impunity is one of the few benefits of working from home over a shared office space.)

I'm having once again to think more explicitly about exercise - I'm definitely gaining weight, despite mostly eating well and doing the right things - and may, once again, have to try and join a gym. Or I might consider becoming a runner. Or something else.

If you're sat in front of a computer all day, what do you do to keep yourself healthy?