Walking Meetings Rock – Here’s How To Start

During your average workday, you may get up every once in a while to go to the restroom or join a pre-meeting in a conference room. If you work remotely from home, you may only leave your desk to do a toilet meditation or grab lunch.

When you sit on your ass for a long time, you feel even more lethargic and lazy. It compounds the issue and creates a downward spiral. It makes it really hard to break the pattern and it ultimately makes managing work stress harder.

There are days when you can feel your muffin top fat bulging out over your pants more than usual. Going up another pants size is what you need now. This feeling sucks and only makes your work day shittier. The free office donuts certainly don’t make things any better.

You know that you should hit the gym and exercise every day, but between the madness of work and personal family life, you neither have the time nor the energy to work out.

You feel like there isn’t a solution, but in fact, there is and it’s a pretty simple and easy one.

For the most part, you’re sitting on your ass for most of the day. And this isn’t good for your health. In fact, this study from the Mayo Clinic shows that excessive sitting leads to increased weight gain, which in turn leads to all sorts of health risks including cardiovascular disease, obesity, musculoskeletal weakness, etc.

Way back when humans were hunter-gatherers and living out of caves, there was no prolonged sitting. Humans were moving around, walking, running and doing all sorts of shit every day to survive. Our caveman ancestors weren’t sitting around for hours in stupid meetings, boring conference calls and stressful commutes. They were hustling to stay alive.

Modern society and civilization now foster sitting all the time. You sit at your desk, sit in your car, sit and watch TV, sit while you eat, etc. The default state of wakefulness is to be sitting. We even use the phrase “take a seat” to tell people to sit down.

All of this just engenders a sedentary lifestyle where you sit on your ass all the time. Humans are not meant to live like this. Our biology and anatomy are designed for movement.

By getting up and moving around more, you can offset and minimize all the potential physiological issues that come with a sedentary lifestyle. This doesn’t mean that you need to be a triathlete. Just the simple act of walking is enough to keep you healthier.

You’ve had these kinds of days. You know, the ones where you have marathon sitting sessions and you get dead butt syndrome. That’s when you know you’ve hit the bottom.

Ideally, you’d be doing low-sweat easy workouts during the day at work or micro-exercises if you’re WFH, but let’s face it, some of us just don’t have the time during the crazy busy day to do light workouts. So, as an alternative, you can combine working and walking to get shit done and get some steps in your day.

Here are some tips and pointers to get in the zone with stepping at work.

The best kinds of walking meetings are with just one other person. This makes it easy to walk and talk side-by-side together. Groups of three or more are not ideal because everyone can’t see and hear each other clearly. Plus, it’s hard to walk three-wide sometimes.

Schedule these one-on-one walking meetings with your coworker just like any other normal meeting. This will ensure that the timeslot gets blocked off in your calendar and won’t get hijacked by pain-in-the-ass coworkers.

Whenever it’s not shitty outside, take your walking discussion out of the building and get some fresh air for your walk-n-talk meeting. It’s great to get outside and away from the stale farty recirculated office air.

As long as the weather is okay, always try to take it outside. Obviously, forget about rainy days, avoid the bone-chilling winter days and the hot-n-humid sticky summer days. Always check with your walking meeting attendee if they want to go outside or not. Related side note - try to walk in nature on the weekends. It’s good for you.

When the weather sucks outside or you’d just prefer to stay indoors, you can always do your walking meetings via a light-n-easy stair climbing session. It’s a great way to add a bit of variety to your normal walking meetings. It can even be a great midday habit to unplug and recharge.

All commercial buildings have at least two sets of stairs as part of building codes. And, all stairs have a minimum required width that is wide enough for two people to use the stairs side-by-side. Go up one set of stairs on one side of the building and walk down the other set. The both of you can burn off those office cake calories.

The best kind of content for walking meetings is simple information sharing and exchange without the need for presentations. This is because you don’t have the ability to project slides while walking. However, this doesn’t mean that it won’t be useful.

Some of the best meetings are when you get the information you need to progress forward. This allows you to keep the momentum going on your projects. Simple convos can do just that.

To keep things documented and for the other person’s reference, you should always send a short summary via email after your walk-n-talk session. This will help both of you to keep track of things - don’t let shit fall through the cracks.

And if it’s for a critical decision or direction, the email summary will also serve as your CYA email. You gotta be sure to protect yourself if and when shit hits the fan.

This is obvious but worth mentioning. You don’t want to be wearing dress shoes for these walking meetings. Although you could, your feet will not be happy. It’s best to have a pair of comfy sneakers, nothing fancy.

Keep a pair of sneaks at your crazy cubicle at work and when it’s time to get some steps in and talk business, you can just swap into them and start walking. Easy peasy. Your feet will thank you.

You know those conference calls where you’re not leading things and not one of the major stakeholders? It’s the ones where you’re just a related minor participant. These are ideal for solo walking sessions because you’re mainly listening and not speaking much.

When it’s time to join the call, put on your sneakers, get your headphones on, dial into the conference call and then start walking and listening. This is a great way to get your body moving during the day. Just be sure to take care of your headphone hair afterward.