New Office Startup Wants To Punish Your For Sitting

And reward you for whaling on your pecs in between conference calls.

Author:
Bess Levin
Updated:
Jan 14, 2019
Original:
Sep 2, 2015

If that sounds like something you'd be interested in, today's your lucky day.

When Joe Lemay, a 38-year-old developer in Boston, decided to leave his corporate job to launch a startup, he opted against a permanent office. Instead, Lemay spends his days at Brooklyn Boulders (BKB) Somerville, a rock-climbing gym designed to double as a co-working haven for entrepreneurs. “I’ll be sitting there coding and get up from my chair, go over to a squat rack, and do 10 reps on the rack, then come back to my computer,” Lemay says. “You can always be in the mindset of being active and productive at the same time.” [...] The premise is to tap indoor rock-climbing’s popularity among those in the tech industry, a trend that puts physical fitness next to disruptive potential and laptops next to free weights...The co-working areas—open to members, as well as to visitors who pay $28 for a day pass—come with their own fitness rules. “We want to incentivize people to not be sitting,” Pinn says. So the gym levees a physical rent for using the space: five sit-ups or five pull-ups every half hour, or one conversation with a stranger in the spirit of enhanced serendipitous innovation.

This Rock Climbing Gym Wants to Disrupt Your Work-Life Balance [Bloomberg via Shane Ferro]

And to show how serious it is about being your friend, here, have a macrame bracelet.

Throughout the week, we've been exploring the workout regimens of various billionaires. George Soros gets his elliptical on at Sitaras Fitness, alongside fellow members like Jack Welch and former Amex chairman James D. Robinson III, who can leg-press 900 pounds). Paul Tudor Jones's wife forces him to practice Ashtanga yoga, though he's allowed to take the summer off. While the practitioners of these routines may have found them to be enjoyable and effective, they contain the rigor of lifting one's hand to stuff another chip in one's mouth when compared to the new workout regimen pioneered by Jesse Itzler, which, we're calling it now, is poised to take the upper echelons of Wall Street by storm. Fueling [billionaire Sara Blakely's] more impetuous side is her entrepreneurial twin: husband Jesse Itzler, 43, a former rapper from Long Island, who has backed and cofounded a few startups, including Marquis Jet, which sells fractional air-travel time. When I meet him at his midtown Manhattan office, he bounds up the stairs in a sweaty headband, his blond curls dripping. He’s come from an intense cardio workout with a Navy SEAL he hired to move in with him and Sara for a month. (This is more efficient than hiring rickshaws from his office, as he used to do, and paying the driver to be a passenger while he hauled the vehicle all the way home.) For what probably amounts to no more than $30/day, you get a 1-2 punch workout, as driving a rickshaw through town would not only tone the lower body but would be tremendously embarrassing for most recognizable millionaires and billionaires. Depending on what route you want to take, in the span of 60 minutes you'll toughen the body and humble the mind. And if you're worried about plateauing, don't be: once you master the rickshaw routine, simply stop by Central Park South and pay a horse drawn carriage driver and his pony to be the passengers while you slap a saddle on your back and pull the cart home. You ass can thank us later. Undercover Billionaire: Sara Blakely Joins The Rich List Thanks To Spanx [Forbes]

When the military-industrial complex gives you a term sheet, you will sign that term sheet.

"To accompany the slides, she gave a nine-minute impromptu talk about whales, a topic she was handed 30 seconds earlier."

Banning jello-shots from the conference room would certainly be an effective deterrent against fraud.

Are you just waking up from a nap, perhaps your second of the day? Did you take it under your desk, curled up on the conference room floor, or in a bathroom stall? If the idea of regularly catching a few winks at your place of work sounds like a fireable offense, relax: apparently everyone is doing it, says Bloomberg BusinessWeek. Yes, from the people who brought you "90 percent of Wall Street does calisthenics in the middle of the trading floor," comes "Sleeping On The Job? Good! Overachievers Do." According to BBW, "many Wall Street types use power-napping to make up for lost sleep," at the office. Where do these naps take place? Wherever looks comfy and you can fit a pillow and an eye mask if overhead lights are an issue. Got some colleagues who haven't gotten the memo and continue to rudely pound the keyboard as though they don't know you're trying to get some sleep here? One woman recommended "heading out to the car to recharge." Sleepy Bankers Take Secret Naps [Bloomberg] Sleeping on the Job? Good! Overachievers Do [BusinessWeek] Related: The “Workout Taking Over Wall Street” Involves Treating Your Place Of Work Like Your Own Personal “Curves”

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