VISIONARIES: Dan Mitchell
Posted on Thursday, January 7th, 2010
by block club
Being a creative thinker can have everything to do with one’s mental agility, but your physical well-being has something to do with it, too. Personal trainer Dan Mitchell believes that the current and future workers of Western New York could benefit from physical activity in the workplace. His workplace wellness program implements a few minutes of mild to moderate activity throughout the day, which Mitchell says is already helping to make local employees think brighter, work harder and be happier. -Ben Siegel
How can what you do benefit people in Buffalo?
I put together a program based on these research studies and my own observations from 25 years of being a trainer, that creative production is a valuable result of exercise, whether at work or at home in your personal life. An individual who can consistently produce good work is seen as being more attractive than an individual who fits the iconic image model. Using mild to moderate exercises facilitates creative production. Not just the potential for it, but actual production.
What does your workplace program entail?
The employee work is to be done at the desk. Literally, standing up at the desk and just working. It’s not rocket science. The exercises on (my instructional) DVD are taken from martial arts discipline, these thousands-of- years-old basic full-body coordinated motions that activate the entire body in a mild to moderate way.
What effects does that have on the mind and body?
Serotonin increases, dopamine increases, toxins are out, the brain is oxygenated, raises the body temperature a little bit, increase plasticity. Research indicates that there’s about a two-hour window immediately following exercise where all of your cognitive functions are enhanced. So the idea is to encourage people to get up and get physical every two to three hours. If we get up right now and do some basic exercise for five minutes your brain is working better immediately. You’ll be able to sit down and work better, write better, think better and communicate better from doing those exercises.
This seems like a logical way of thinking.
About every 10 years the fitness industry goes through a change in focus. In the ’70s it was bodybuilding. In the ’80s it was aerobics. In the ’90s it was alternative therapies like tai chi and yoga. In the 2000s it’s gone into what they call core training, this idea of getting back to your core. One of the new directions is cognitive enhancement. What you can do with your brain as a function of health and fitness training.
