Commutable: Will harris

How to keep fit while sitting still all day

There are many perils that can befall a commuter. Delays. Cancellations. Nodding off through sleep deprivation and waking up in Bedford (or worse, Luton, where commuters end up on bricks, someone having run off with their loafers). But by far the most serious risk, from my perspective at least, is the constant and unavoidable threat of getting fat.
With our frenetic 21st century lives, maintaining a body beautiful is a difficult enough challenge at the best of times. Throw in a daily, four hour round trip between your home and place of employment, and it becomes almost impossible. All those hours spent ensconced in the comfort of a train seat may be a boon for working, or reading, or just watching the world go by, but none of these things burn calories (or if they do, not in sufficient quantities to offset a Victoria Station sausage roll at 8pm while Southern irons out whatever cataclysm has brought the network to a standstill that day).
On top of that, when you commute a serious distance to a desk job, it takes Herculean effort to shoehorn a gym membership into your routine. With only a sliver of a work-out window before your morning departure and after you return that night (when frankly, you have become a human-shaped avatar of exhaustion anyway), the idea of sinking a portion of your wage into a gym membership – on top of the hundreds of pounds you fling at the rail operators each month – feels like a gamble you might not win.

Perhaps that’s why longer travel times have been linked to a range of health issues, including obesity, high blood pressure, and heart disease. Yes. As if delayed trains and shivering on cold platforms weren’t bad enough, our commutes may actually be killing us.
Defeatism, I hear you cry. Laziness. The idea that commuters must somehow make an irrevocable choice between working and working out is nothing but a convenient excuse, a shield for the weak-willed and doughy desk jockeys of the world to cower behind. And perhaps you’re right.
I am already trialling two strategies to try and keep the scales from tipping into the danger zone. The first has been (well, durrr) to try reduce my calorie intake, something I – being a veteran foodie – find hard. It’s one thing not to engage with the fairytale trail of cakes, biscuits and other treats that pervade office life (all of which lead to a gingerbread cottage, with type 2 diabetes inside), but quite another to stave off the desire to reward yourself after getting home at the end of another epic commute.
The second, more successful strategy involves taking an actual lunch break, as opposed to continuing to sit at my desk and answer emails, with the slight variation that I’m simultaneously shovelling carbohydrates into my face. OK, so I rarely break a sweat and my ‘lunchtime circuits’ might only take me around the homewares floor at John Lewis (“No more cushions!” yells my other half when he hears the rustle of carrier bags approaching down the hallway), but it’s still activity, isn’t it?