Working Out at Work – INSANITY!!!

FeeFighters workout video – watch FeeFighters work out.

Promoting health and wellness at the office seems to be all the rage, so we FeeFighters decided to get in on the fun.

We have fresh fruit delivered to the office frequently (thanks, Sandbox!), encourage bike-riding (I usually ride to work, even in the bitterly cold Chicago winter), and healthy eating (pizza fridays excepted). In honor of American Heart Month (Ok, I actually just Google’d “February is” and that was the second thing that came up… Black history month didn’t seem to work as well) – FeeFighters have instituted an INSANE workout policy that is sure to make us the envy of startups everywhere.

We are doing the Insanity workout, as a company. This is not your typical infomercial workout for losers, it is INSANITY.  Shaun T is our pumped-up and never-let-up personal trainer, and he teaches us to sweat and burn our way through long periods of maximum-intensity exercise with only short periods of rest. Each workout keeps you “digging deep” by alternating between intervals of aerobic and anaerobic exercise and between strength, power, resistance, and ab/core training moves.

We’ve only just started, and we’ve included our designer Tisho (joining in all the way from Sofia, Bulgaria via videochat!). We use our dashboard monitor (where we normally track cool stuff to learn how much money we are saving small businesses).

Working out as a company has a number of benefits...

 

5 reasons you should work out as a company:

1) It makes you healthier

Healthy workers are working workers, which is better than unhealthy and not-working. 

2) It makes you smarter.

We FeeFighters are a pretty gifted bunch. Still, we figure it’s no harm to become more genius-er.

Thomas Edison once said:

“Genius is one percent inspiration and 99 percent perspiration.”

We FeeFighters have a lot of inspiration but were sorely lacking on the perspiration front. Now, thanks to Shaun T, we are sweating a whole lot. Hopefully we’ll be able to bring our inspiration/perspiration ratio closer to the golden 1:99 level soon.

3) It builds team unity

At my old workplace (a management consulting firm), it was somewhat awkward to run into co-workers at the gym… normally, listening to your wannabe weightlifting boss grunt through a 50 pound benchpress is not a good experience. At a startup though, you practically live with the folks you work with, so it’s not a big deal, and a good release from a day of stressful customer service calls (we talk to people all day who got lied to by their credit card processor, and sometimes they don’t believe that we are as transparent, honest, and merchant friendly as we actually are).

4) It makes you leaner

We’ve heard that there are lots of awesome benefits to be gained by being a “lean” startup. Insanity will DEFINITELY make us lean-er.

5) It makes you stronger and more ninja-like

 

This is our mascot, Joe. He’s a ninja. He fights credit card processing fees for businesses everywhere. As we grow larger, we need more ninja’s to help more customers. Insanity is one step along the path.

If you want to get into the workout too, you can pick up the videos here.

We’d actually like to get into some sort of healthy-ness competition with some other startups… if you have some ideas, drop me a line: [email protected]