How I Burn 976 Calories While Chatting With Colleagues

The Story: My Secret Weapon (And It Is Not What You Think)

Take a look at my latest running stats from this week. 976 kcal burned in 69 minutes.

Now, before you dismiss this as some grueling punishment session, here is the plot twist: I was having a genuine conversation the entire time. We were laughing. We were catching up on life. Someone cracked a joke that almost made me trip. This did not feel like a workout. It felt like the best part of my Tuesday.

Every Tuesday, I join my colleagues for our office Running Club session before lunch. What started as a small group a few months ago has grown organically. People noticed something different about us on Tuesday afternoons: we were sharper, more energized, and frankly, more fun to be around. Now it is a movement, and the results speak for themselves.

Here is the thing that made this click for me: burning 976 calories while socializing feels like cheating the system. You are solving your fitness, your energy, your stress, and your workplace relationships in a single 1-hour block. No gym membership. No hour-long commute. No white-knuckling through a solo workout you dread. It is high performance without the suffering, and the science behind why this works is far more interesting than the calories burned.

But here is the problem most of us are actually living with. It is 2 PM. You are staring at your screen, but your brain feels like it is wrapped in cotton. You have got three more hours of work ahead, but you are already mentally checked out. That afternoon crash hits like clockwork, leaving you scrolling social media instead of tackling your priority tasks.

Maybe you started the day with good intentions, but by lunch, you are already feeling that familiar mental fog creeping in. Your energy tanks, your focus scatters, and suddenly even simple decisions feel overwhelming. You tell yourself you will hit the gym after work, but when evening comes, you are too drained to do anything but collapse on the couch.

This is the relentless cycle that traps engineers, tech leaders, and CTOs: long hours, endless tasks, and energy that disappears faster than your motivation. Poor fitness, nutrition, and recovery habits leave you feeling fatigued, unfocused, and stuck in procrastination mode. The worst part? You know you are capable of so much more, but you cannot seem to break free.

The office fitness club is not the only answer to that cycle. But it is the most efficient one I have ever found. And the science behind why it works so well is what the rest of this article is about.

Who I Am

I am Ivan Aseev, a Tech Lead with over 23 years of experience delivering projects for Fortune 500 companies like Samsung, Panasonic, and Huggies. I am also a Certified International Personal Trainer and Nutrition Adviser who transformed his own body from 120kg to 74kg at age 40. I have lived on both sides of this equation: the burned-out, foggy tech professional and the focused, energized version of that same person. The difference was not willpower or discipline. It was systems.

The Science: Why This Combination Is So Powerful

What makes the office fitness club format uniquely effective is not just the exercise or just the social interaction. It is the collision of multiple biological and psychological systems firing simultaneously. Each one alone delivers benefits. Together, they create something exponential.

The Myokine Effect: Your Muscles Are a Pharmacy

Here is something most people have never heard of, and it changes everything about how you think about exercise.

When your muscles contract during physical activity, they release a family of signaling molecules called myokines. These are not just metabolic byproducts. They are active messengers that travel through your bloodstream and communicate directly with your brain, your fat cells, your immune system, and your organs.¹

Research published in Endocrine Reviews identified over 300 myokines regulated in response to muscle contraction, and the implications are staggering.² Key myokines released during exercise include:

BDNF (Brain-Derived Neurotrophic Factor): This is your brain's growth hormone. It promotes neurogenesis, strengthens synaptic connections, and has been shown to improve memory, learning, and cognitive flexibility. Aerobic exercise training for just three months increased hippocampal volume by 12% in healthy individuals.³ That is not a typo. Your brain literally grows.

Irisin: This myokine, released primarily during sustained cardio like running, triggers the browning of white fat tissue. Browning converts energy-storing fat into energy-burning fat, boosting your metabolic rate hours after exercise ends.⁴

IL-6 (Interleukin-6): When released from muscle during exercise, IL-6 acts as an anti-inflammatory agent and plays a direct role in glucose uptake and fat oxidation.² It also stimulates the release of other anti-inflammatory molecules, creating a cascade effect that reduces systemic inflammation.

Cathepsin B (CTSB): A recently discovered myokine that crosses the blood-brain barrier and stimulates BDNF production in the hippocampus. Research demonstrates that exercise-induced CTSB promotes adult neurogenesis and improves spatial memory.³

The bottom line: every time you run, you are not just burning calories. Your muscles are flooding your body with molecules that sharpen your brain, reduce inflammation, fight depression, and optimize your metabolism. As Kelly McGonigal writes in The Joy of Movement, exercised muscles become "basically a pharmacy for your physical and mental health."⁵

Glucose Regulation: Silencing the Afternoon Crash

That 2 PM energy crash you experience every single day? There is a metabolic explanation, and morning exercise is one of the most effective interventions available.

Your brain runs on glucose. When blood sugar spikes and crashes, so does your cognitive function. Attention, working memory, decision-making—all of these degrade in direct proportion to glycemic instability.⁶ For engineers and tech leaders who spend 8 hours making high-stakes decisions, this is not a minor inconvenience. It is a performance killer.

Here is where morning exercise becomes a game-changer. Aerobic exercise enhances glucose uptake in muscles independently of insulin, which means your body becomes dramatically more efficient at pulling glucose from the bloodstream and using it as fuel.⁷ This effect persists for hours after exercise ends, creating a window of stable blood sugar and sustained cognitive output that covers your entire workday.

Research has shown that even brief bouts of physical activity can significantly improve blood sugar regulation during prolonged sitting. One study found that performing bodyweight squats every 45 minutes during an 8.5-hour sitting period improved blood sugar control more effectively than a single 30-minute walk.⁸ The mechanism is simple: muscle contraction activates glucose transporters that operate completely independently of insulin signaling.

Running with your colleagues before lunch does not just burn fat. It programs your metabolic system to deliver stable, consistent energy to your brain for the rest of the afternoon. No crash. No fog. No desperate reach for your third coffee.

Social Rest: The Most Underrated Recovery Tool in Tech

Most tech professionals think rest means sleep. Sleep is critical, but it is only one dimension of recovery. Dr. Saundra Dalton-Smith, physician and author of Sacred Rest, identified seven distinct types of rest that the human body and mind require to function at full capacity: physical, mental, emotional, sensory, creative, social, and spiritual.⁹

Social rest is the one almost nobody in tech is getting.

Here is the counterintuitive part: social rest does not mean isolation. It means surrounding yourself with people who restore your energy rather than drain it. It means connection that feels effortless, supportive, and genuinely enjoyable.⁹ For most engineers and tech leaders, the social interactions during the workday are transactional. Status updates. Code reviews. Meetings with agendas. These interactions deplete rather than replenish.

The office fitness club flips this entirely. The social dynamic during shared physical activity is fundamentally different from any other workplace interaction. There is no agenda. There is no performance pressure. You are side by side rather than face to face, which psychologists have long noted reduces social tension and encourages deeper, more honest conversation.¹⁰ The shared physical effort creates an atmosphere of mutual vulnerability that strips away the professional masks people wear behind their desks.

This is genuine social rest happening during what most people would classify as exercise. You are simultaneously recovering socially while investing physically. That kind of efficiency does not exist anywhere else in a typical workday.

The Oxytocin-Trust Loop: How Training Together Rewires Your Team

Trust is the single most important variable in team productivity, and it is one of the hardest to build in a remote or hybrid workplace. Google's Project Aristotle confirmed what many leaders already suspected: psychological safety, the feeling that it is safe to take interpersonal risks within a team, is the number one predictor of team performance.¹¹

But psychological safety does not appear from nowhere. It is built through shared experience, vulnerability, and mutual dependence. And here is where the fitness club becomes a secret weapon for workplace culture.

When you exercise together, your body releases oxytocin. This is not a minor effect. Research confirms that group exercise sessions trigger significant oxytocin release, and oxytocin plays a direct role in building trust, enhancing social recognition, and strengthening team cohesion.¹² Studies show that oxytocin increased trust in strangers specifically, not just familiar people, which means even new team members begin building trust faster through shared physical activity.¹³

There is a deeper mechanism at work as well. Mirror neurons, the brain cells that fire when we observe others taking action or expressing emotion, activate powerfully during shared physical challenges. This neural mirroring creates rapid alignment and empathy between participants.¹⁴ When you push through difficulty together, even something as accessible as an 1-hour run, your brain begins to categorize those people as part of your in-group in a way that no team-building workshop can replicate.

The trust built during a Tuesday run carries directly into Monday's sprint planning and Wednesday's code review. People who have suffered and laughed together on the pavement communicate differently. They share ideas more freely. They give honest feedback without sugarcoating it. They cover for each other when things get tough.

A Harvard Business Review study on high-trust organizations found that compared to low-trust companies, high-trust teams demonstrated 50% higher productivity, 76% greater engagement, and 28% lower burnout.¹⁵ The fitness club is not just a physical activity. It is a trust-building engine disguised as a lunchtime routine.

Morning Movement and the Myokine-Cognition Window

Timing matters more than most people realize. Exercising before lunch is not just a scheduling convenience. It is a strategic cognitive optimization move.

The myokines released during morning exercise, particularly BDNF and cathepsin B, do not disappear the moment you stop running. They remain elevated in your bloodstream for hours, continuing to support neurogenesis, synaptic plasticity, and cognitive function well into the afternoon.³ This creates what researchers refer to as a post-exercise cognitive enhancement window, a period during which your brain is operating at measurably higher capacity than baseline.

Research from the Journal of Sport and Exercise Psychology confirmed that acute exercise performed in the morning produced significantly greater improvements in executive function, attention, and processing speed compared to the same exercise performed later in the day.¹⁶ The biological reason is tied to circadian cortisol rhythms. Morning cortisol levels are naturally elevated to promote alertness, and exercise amplifies this effect without tipping into chronic stress territory.

By exercising before lunch, you are essentially stacking biological advantages: elevated BDNF, stabilized glucose, heightened cortisol sensitivity, and reduced inflammatory markers, all converging during the hours when you need to do your most demanding cognitive work.

The Accountability Effect: Free Consistency Without Willpower

Willpower is a finite resource. Relying on it to maintain a fitness routine is like running a production server on a single point of failure. Eventually, it crashes.

Group accountability eliminates this vulnerability entirely. Research on exercise adherence shows that people who exercise in groups are significantly more likely to maintain consistency over time compared to solo exercisers.¹⁷ The mechanism is straightforward: when you commit to showing up for others, the social cost of skipping becomes higher than the physical cost of showing up.

This is not guilt. It is social architecture. The fitness club creates a low-friction, high-reward consistency loop that requires zero willpower once established. You show up because your colleagues expect you. You stay consistent because the routine becomes part of your social life, not just your fitness plan.

Why Most People Never Discover This

The reason this approach is so underrated comes down to how we have been conditioned to think about fitness. We have been taught that exercise must be hard, solitary, and uncomfortable to be effective. Grind culture has infiltrated fitness culture. The result? Millions of engineers, developers, and tech leaders forcing themselves through workouts they hate, burning out within weeks, and concluding that fitness is not for them.

That narrative is wrong. The science is unambiguous: enjoyment is not a luxury addition to exercise. It is a prerequisite for sustainable results. When exercise feels like something you look forward to rather than something you endure, consistency becomes automatic.¹⁸

The office fitness club is the embodiment of this principle. It stacks social connection, physical intensity, cognitive optimization, and workplace culture improvement into a single weekly ritual. And most tech teams have never even considered it.

Can You Not Run? No Problem. Alternative Club Formats

The principles that make the fitness club effective apply to any shared physical activity performed with colleagues. The key ingredients are: group setting, moderate-to-high intensity, and genuine social interaction. Here are proven alternatives that deliver the same benefits:

Jump Rope: Portable, intense, and surprisingly social. You can run jump rope sessions side by side, share techniques, and keep the conversation flowing. Excellent cardiovascular stimulus and myokine release.

Yoga or Pilates: Lower intensity, but still delivers social rest, stress reduction, and physical recovery. Particularly effective for teams dealing with chronic desk-related tension.

Badminton or Table Tennis: Fast-paced, genuinely fun, and competitive enough to trigger the same neurochemical benefits as running. These formats also create natural turn-taking and communication patterns that transfer directly to teamwork.

Brisk Walking or Hiking: If running feels like too much of a barrier, structured walking groups deliver meaningful cardiovascular benefits, strong social connection, and the added advantage of green exercise, which research links to reduced cortisol and improved mood.¹⁹

The format matters far less than the consistency and the social element. Pick what your team will actually do, and do it regularly.

How to Start Your Own Club

It is easier than you think, and you do not need a budget, a facility, or a fitness certification.

Start with my free Club Starter's Poll Form—a Google Doc template designed to gather your team's preferences in under 2 minutes. Open the link, make a copy to your own Google Drive, share it with your colleagues, and let them vote on activities, days, and times. The results will be right in front of everyone, no back-and-forth needed. Grab the template here.

Pick the top choice from the results and schedule regular sessions, once or twice a week, 30 to 60 minutes. Keep it on the calendar like a standing meeting.

The magic happens when people see the change in you first. They will notice your increased energy, your sharper focus, your better mood. That is when they will want to join. Start small. Two or three people is enough. The social dynamics and accountability effects kick in immediately.

Take the first step toward a healthier, sharper team today.

Take the Next Step

If this resonated with you, it is just the beginning. The fitness club is one piece of a larger system for building sustained physical and cognitive performance as a tech professional.

If you want structured, actionable guidance for building fitness, nutrition, and recovery protocols that actually fit your life as an engineer or tech leader, grab my book 6-Pack ABS for Keyboard Warriors. It is the same science-based framework I built my own transformation on, written specifically for engineers and tech leaders.

Want a personalized starting point? Take my free Performance Audit. It takes 3 to 5 minutes and gives you an immediate, actionable analysis of where you stand and what to focus on first. No booking required.

Final Thought

That 976-calorie burn you saw at the top of this article? It is not the point. The point is that peak physical output and genuine human connection happened at the same time, in 69 minutes, before lunch, on a Tuesday. No gym. No special gear. No suffering.

This is what fitness looks like when you stop treating it like punishment and start treating it like infrastructure for everything else you want to achieve.

Start small. Invite a colleague. Show up next Tuesday.

Your best self is not waiting for someday. It is waiting for next week.

Ivan Aseev Certified International Personal Trainer & Nutrition Adviser | 23+ Years Leading Engineering Teams | Author of 6-Pack ABS for Keyboard Warriors

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