Healthy teleworking: Towards personalized exercise recommendations

Abstract

Home-based teleworking, associated with sedentary behavior, may impair self-reported adult health status. Current exercise recommendations, based on universal recipes, may be insufficient or even misleading to promote healthy teleworking. From the Network Physiology of Exercise perspective, health is redefined as an adaptive emergent state, product of dynamic interactions among multiple levels (from genetic to social) that cannot be reduced to a few dimensions. Under such a perspective, fitness development is focused on enhancing the individual functional diversity potential, which is better achieved through varied and personalized exercise proposals. This paper discusses some myths related to ideal or unique recommendations, like the ideal exercise or posture, and the contribution of recent computer technologies and applications for prescribing exercise and assessing fitness. Highlighting the need for creating personalized working environments and strengthening the active contribution of users in the process, new recommendations related to teleworking posture, home exercise counselling, exercise monitoring and to the roles of healthcare and exercise professionals are proposed. Instead of exercise prescribers, professionals act as co-designers that help users to learn, co-adapt and adequately contextualize exercise in order to promote their somatic awareness, job satisfaction, productivity, work–life balance, wellbeing and health.