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Workplace Wellness Lab delivers leading insights, ideas and information on wellness, health management, and healthy living.

Our goal is simple: Workplace Wellness Lab provides regular and better information as an important path to create healthy individual outcomes, while helping change health care in America.

By connecting the audiences that matter – consultants, corporate executives, policymakers, thought leaders, journalists, customers, and more – we establish a positive, substantive, and influential voice within the wellness industry that makes the case that:

    • Left unchecked, current trends in health spend and outcomes are unsustainable.
    • Given that half the healthcare dollars in this country are incurred by employers, well-executed preventive care health management programs in the worksite are clearly enduring and valuable, helping drive improved workplace environments and individual outcomes.
    • Industry coherence around private sector innovation to drive effective health management programs is economically vital, given what’s possible in a spend category that is arguably one of the greatest challenges in America today.

Workplace Wellness Lab comes at this challenge principally from the employer point of view: What are the credible and demonstrated best practices in preventive care to structure programs that have an enduring impact? How can the impact be made explicit, as something that is both the right thing to do and a proactive business initiative that lowers the cost of care, as experienced by both employers and employees?

And Workplace Wellness Lab goes beyond the workplace. It’s a robust platform filled with ideas and insights from those that influence how employers think about this opportunity: research organizations, non-profits, think tanks and more.

From an editorial point of view, great ideas can come from anywhere. With that philosophy in mind, we will combine our own original content with other content across the web. We organize the content, with a view to making it as simple and useful as possible.

All content will be sourced. If we found it somewhere, we’ll tell you where we got — and how to get to that site yourself.

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As we approach a major U.S. holiday week, we recognize that this provides a good opportunity for a workplace wellness reset: How to encourage members to make physical activity an every day activity.

As the British Nutrition Foundation (BNF) claims: “Everybody, regardless of age, shape, size and ability needs to become more active every day. We should all be moving more. Did you know that an active life is essential for physical and mental health and wellbeing?”

Indeed, regular fitness is central to managing chronic disease and staying healthy.

BNF continues: “Regular physical activity can help decrease our risk of cancer and type 2 diabetes, and conditions like obesity, hypertension and depression. Being active at every age increases quality of life and everyone’s chances of remaining healthy and independent.”

“We know that, at both work and home, technology encourages us to sit for long periods. We are also more likely to use motorised transport rather than walking or cycling, or use lifts instead of stairs.”

“For activity to be effective for our health and wellbeing it does not mean we have to take part in vigorous activity. According to guidelines from the UK Chief Medical Officers, we should aim to take part in at least 150 minutes of moderate intensity physical activity each week, in bouts of 10 minutes or more. However, over one in four women and one in five men do less than 30 minutes of physical activity a week, so are classified as ‘inactive’. In fact, physical inactivity is the fourth largest cause of disease and disability in the UK.”

The post offers guidance on how to integrate fitness into one's schedule.

“Your 150 minutes could be made up of 5 x 30 minute sessions during the week.”

  • “Thirty minutes of moderate aerobic activity could be met by going for a brisk walk, a swim, or gardening.”
  • “The recommendations can also be met through doing more, shorter sessions of at least 10 minutes each. Short activities can add up –just a couple of ten minute brisk walks a day can get you well on your way to meeting the recommendations.”
  • “Involve friends and family to make activities more fun, sociable and enjoyable. Go jogging with a friend and support and motivate each other, take the children swimming or join an exercise class.”

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