A8| Tuesday, September 13, 2016 THE WALL STREET JOURNAL.
PERSONAL JOURNAL.
sick, she always would say, ‘Find
thetimetotakecareofyour
health, because you will always
find the time to take care of your
illness,’ ” Mrs. Micallef says.
“That’s why I always find the
time.”
Ms. Micallef’s workouts begin
at 6 a.m., Monday through Friday.
She has personal trainers in Cal-
gary, Vancouver and Toronto and
keeps an extra bike and workout
gear at her 26-year-old son’s To-
ronto apartment. When she is in
New York City, which is about one
week a month, a trainer comes to
her hotel.
Each day her workout will focus
on a different muscle group: For
legs and back, she might perform
three sets each of step-ups, re-
verse flyes, split squats, and stand-ing back extensions using a TRX
Suspension Trainer.
Depending on which competi-
tion or bike ride she is training for,
she cycles or boxes in the after-
noons or evenings at Impact Box-
ing & Fitness in Calgary. “Boxing is
one of the scariest things,” Ms. Mi-
callef says.
Ms. Micallef does various drills
on different bags with a trainer. Or
she rides on Calgary’s bike paths,
completing rides of two to three
hours on weekends. After last
year’s Branch Out Bike Tour, she
hired a cycling coach for three
days. “I felt really out of control on
the downhills and was surprised
that the hardest part for me
wasn’t the uphill, but being able to
concentrate on the long flat
stretches of road,” she said. “Mycoach helped teach me to ride
more efficiently and to focus.”
Ms. Micallef starts her day with
a cup of organic ginger-green tea.
Her breakfast concoction is a com-
bination of goat-milk yogurt, ber-
ries, cucumbers, chia, hemp and
flax seeds, shredded coconut,
spices like cinnamon, cayenne and
turmeric, fish oil and a touch of
maple syrup. “It’s a challenge to
get all of my ingredients into my
yogurt when I travel, but I try,”
she says. Lunch and dinner are
protein- and vegetable-focused;
pasta with capers, artichokes, spin-
ach and kale is a go-to meal. She
snacks on raw vegetables or apples
throughout the day, and cuts out
all sugar leading up to a body-
building competition. “Luckily, I
don’t have a sweet tooth,” shesays.
Ms. Micallef bought a Special-
ized Elite Ruby road bike for
$3,500 (prices in Canadian dol-
lars); her Shimano Ultegra 6800
wheel set cost $750. She spent
$750 on an ultralight Scicon Aero-
comfort bike bag so she can travel
with her bike. She likes Campag-
nolo cycling apparel, Specialized
Body Geometry gel gloves and her
Specialized Sierra helmet. She
spent $350 on her Sidi Eagle 5 Fit
Venice bike shoes. She boxes in
Everlast Grid high top boxing
shoes and runs in Brooks Adrena-
line GTS shoes.She buys Lolë leg-
gings, Nike shorts and Gap Fit
tops. Her custom-made competi-
tion bathing suit cost $250. She
spends about $100 an hour on
training.ducted while walking, experts say.
Although standing desks have
received attention in recent years,
standing burns scarcely more calo-
ries than sitting, according to a
study of 74 people by researchers
at the University of Pittsburgh
published earlier this year in the
Journal of Physical Activity and
Health.
The study found that walking
for 15 minutes burns an average of56 calories, compared with 20 cal-
ories for sitting at a laptop com-
puter and 22 for standing. Walking
participants moved at about 2.
miles an hour, says study co-au-
thor Seth Creasy, now a postdoc-
toral fellow at the University of
Colorado, Denver. That’s a bit
slower than the 3-miles-an-hour
federal health guidelines say
counts as brisk walking.
Sorrelle Harper says she got “afew sort of quizzical looks from
some people” when she suggested
a few months ago that her office
hold walking meetings. The head
of communications at business-ad-
visory firm KPMG in London none-
theless paired off the 26 people in
her department and sent them on
one 30-minute walking meeting a
week. The pairings were randomly
assigned and rotated weekly to in-
clude everyone and to stimulate
new conversations.
Each pair settles on a topic,
which can range from career goals
to client strategy, ahead of time.
All the talks are confidential,
which has made them more candid
than typical meetings, Ms. Harper
says. Despite occasional rain and
even snow flurries, employees
have embraced the meetings, Ms.
Harper says. People seem “much
more animated when they’re walk-
ing side-by-side in the fresh air.”
Paula Bracey is a director of
project management at the SouthThey don’t require yoga pants
or a shower, but the research is
clear: Walking meetings count as
exercise.
“If corporations were to adopt
this ubiquitously, you just start to
think of those health benefits add-
ing up,” says James Levine, co-di-
rector of obesity solutions at the
Mayo Clinic and Arizona State Uni-
versity. “It’s an amazingly simple
thing and it costs nothing.”
Walking meetings are typically
held with two or three people over
a set route and period—often 30
minutes. They can take place at a
nearby park or even in office hall-
ways. Some people are using walk-
ing meetings to boost their daily
step counts. Others are spurred by
mounting research on the physical
and mental benefits of being more
mobile at work.
One of the few studies on walk-
ing meetings, published this year,
demonstrated their potential. The
three-week study, co-written by Dr.
Alberto J. Caban-Martinez, a phy-
sician and scientist at the Univer-
sity of Miami, showed a 10-minute
gain among the 17 participants in
weekly physical activity after they
added walking meetings.
The more participants engaged
in moderate physical activity at
work, the less likely they were to
miss work for health reasons, ac-
cording to the study, published in
the journal Preventing Chronic
Disease. Being sedentary for long
stretches is linked with obesity,
Type 2 diabetes and a range of
other conditions.
Most Americans get less than
the recommended 150 minutes a
week of moderate-intensity aero-
bic activity, such as brisk walking.
Previous studies have shown that
walking for as little as 15 minutes
a day can add up to three years of
life expectancy.
Walking meetings have been
outlined in a TED Talk and encour-
aged in a Funny or Die video with
the cast of “The West Wing,”
whose characters were known for
their frequent walk-and-talks. The
2015 federal dietary guidelines
suggested people use walking
meetings to increase physical ac-
tivity.
Meetings, phone calls and email
have come to consume more than
90% of the working time of man-
agers and some other workers,
such as consultants. Many of those
meetings and calls could be con-
BYRACHELBACHMAN
Margot Micallef, above and left,
prepares for 100-mile bike rides and
bikini fitness competitions by working
out with Louie Raposo, of Impact
Boxing & Fitness in Calgary, Alberta.FROM TOP: ISTOCK; KPMG UKBikinis and pasta might seem
like an odd pairing, but not to
Margot Micallef. The 57-year-old
eats a lot of pasta, as chief execu-
tive of Gabriella’s Kitchen, a forti-
fied pasta company based outside
Toronto. She also competes in bi-
kini fitness competitions.
After losing her sister and busi-
ness partner, Ga-
briella Micallef,
to cancer in
2012, Ms. Mi-
callef turned to
exercise. “I was overwhelmed by
the loss, as well as the challenge of
running the company on my own,”
she says.
Ms. Micallef hired a personal
trainer, joined a boxing gym and
started biking with a friend. “Exer-
cise gave me mental clarity and fo-
cus,” she says.
Ms. Micallef divides her time
among Calgary, Vancouver and To-
ronto because she runs two busi-
nesses: Oliver Capital Partners, in
Calgary, Alberta, which invests in
private companies looking for ex-
pansion capital or an outright sale;
and Gabriella’s Kitchen, which sells
high-protein, gluten-free products
under the label Skinnypasta.
Eventually, Ms. Micallef got so
fit that her trainer, Yvan Courn-
oyer, suggested she sign up for a
bodybuilding competition. “I al-
ways thought bodybuilding was for
Arnold Schwarzenegger types,” she
says. Last year, in May, she com-
peted in a regional fitness compe-
tition of the British Columbia Ama-
teur Bodybuilding Association and
placed second in the age 45-plus
bikini category.She plans to com-
pete in the Popeye’s Fall Classic bi-
kini competition in November.
To balance her strength train-
ing, Ms. Micallef does long-dis-
tance cycling. For the past two
years she has participated in the
Branch Out Bike Tour, a 100-kilo-
meter ride in Panorama, British
Columbia. “When my sister got
BYJENMURPHY
Boxing, Biking and Bikinis: The Three B’s of Fitness
BRIAN BUCHSDRUECKER FOR THE WALL JOURNAL (2)WHAT’S YOUR
WORKOUT?
Walking in London
Becca Appleby and Nahidur
Rahman hold a walking meeting
near the London office of business-
advisory firm KPMG.Carolina Department of Health and
Environmental Control in Colum-
bia, S.C. She was startled to learn
from an app months ago she was
getting only about one-third of her
10,000-steps-a-day goal.
Ms. Bracey started inviting col-
leagues on 15-minute walking
meetings, a few a week. She came
to find that the mobile meetings
are more relaxed than seated ones,
and remove barriers between man-
agers and employees.
“Even just having a desk be-
tween two people, it almost states
that you’re in this position and
they’re in that position,” Ms.
Bracey says. “When you’re side by
side, we’re there with our comfy
shoes on and we’re just two peo-
ple out walking.”
Walking meetings also spur
more ideas, Ms. Bracey says. Re-
search backs her up. Creative out-
put increases by an average of 60%
when people are walking, accord-
ing to a 2014 Stanford University
of 176 college students and other
adults. Study participants were
asked to think of alternate uses for
a given object, for instance, while
they were seated or walking. When
people were walking, they pro-
duced more responses that no one
else in the group had thought of
than when they were sitting.
Jeff Donnay, a managing direc-
tor at Salo, a Minneapolis-based
staffing and consulting agency,
says he often walks while talking
on the phone.
“I’m on a wireless headset, so
I’m walking around the office right
now,” he said in a recent phone
call.
Mr. Donnay says a study of of-
fice-based health care conducted
at Salo and co-written by the
Mayo Clinic’s Dr. Levine, published
in 2011, persuaded him and his col-
leagues to move more at work. Mr.
Donnay also holds about two 30-
minute walking meetings a month,
sometimes in a nearby park.
In a previous job, Paul Nuki re-
called staging long, out-of-office
walking meetings that turned out
to be too ambitious for some of
his co-workers.
“Three or four members of the
team would book a holiday for
that day or phone in sick,” he re-
calls. Mr. Nuki has since co-
founded a London-based company,
StepJockey, to combat sedentary
behavior in large office buildings
by promoting the use of stairs.
He says it’s also important to
make clear that walking meetings
are work, not meanderings or gos-
sip sessions. “If bosses see you
wandering outside heading to a
cafe, the instinct is, ‘Why aren’t
they at their desks working?’ ” Mr.
Nuki says. “So you need to let peo-
ple know.”The health benefits are
real for people who
regularly take walking
meetings at work
The Office Walk-and-Talk Really Works
How to Walk and Talk
Limit meetings to two to three people Keep meetings to 30 minutes Aim to get 150 minutes of aerobic activity a week Walking for 15 minutes burns an average of 56 calories Sitting at a laptop for 15 minutes burns 20 calories Standing at a desk for 15 minutes burns 22 caloriesTo reprint or license content, please contact our reprints and licensing department at +1 800-843-0008 or http://www.djreprints.com