There are often articles in the news about how people should remember to exercise during the workday. This is especially important for us data people. We can basically spend our entire workday sitting and punching at our keyboards. Sitting is a silent killer and so on.

However, employers do not often provide organized exercises so it’s up to the employee to be active and do something about it. So what should we do? Maybe use a smaller coffee cups to go and refill it more often? Use the toilet which is further along the aisle? Do standing meetings?

There’s no need to organize common exercises at Zure or to think about the size of anyone’s coffee cup. We have an excellent form of exercise: foosball. It’s a bit like traditional Finnish table hockey but players move only sideways and without sticks.

In our internal Slack channel, we have an entire foosball ranking system. You can challenge anyone you want and the results are recorded directly to the system. Each new player gets 800 starting points which are then lost and won according to how you fare in ranked matches – the amount of gained and lost points depends on how many points your opponent has. The best players in the ranking have about double the initial points and the worst about half.

It’s not uncommon to see players enter the playroom with their colleagues and exit with their sweaty t-shirt on. How many calories are burned during an intensive 10-minute foosball match? How many coffee retrieval trips does one game cover? Our employees can have multiple games in a day so I’d like to say: we fulfill the daily work exercise requirements quite well. Furthermore, players always exchange at least a few words with the opponent, possibly even related to work. It’s not uncommon for me to accidentally find out something new related to my project during the game. I don’t think there are any losers in this equation: in any case, occasional breaks are needed during the working day.

Doctors who want to increase well-being and physical activity at work, come and try out foosball at our workplace and recommend this exercise elsewhere too! New employees come and work with us, we need your points!