Transcript
Zack Arnold: So I’m here today with Kris Herrera and Todd Capriva, both of whom work for Adobe. But as we know in today’s world, just because they work for the same company doesn’t exactly mean that they work in the same office or even with each other. But the cool thing is, is that they both have a very similar view of being healthy in the workplace, and that’s why we’re chatting today because I originally approached Adobe to be a sponsor for this program because I love their products. I love Adobe Premiere, and I went to the Adobe Premiere Pro World Conference in San Jose last year representing Fitness and Post. It was kind of my first foray into the world of expos and meeting people in this industry, and kind of thought that people would laugh at me and ignore me because everybody thought that Fitness and Post was an oxymoron. But then I started talking to people, and I realized that Adobe is really, really forward thinking in the world of health for their employees. And I wanted people that are listening, if they’re you know associate producers, co-producers, production supervisors that have something to do with the quality of health in your office. I thought it’d be really good to hear from the perspective of somebody that is in charge of that, and also somebody that is in charge of actually creating one of the best software products on the planet, which is Adobe After Effects. So, Kris and Todd, welcome
Todd Kopriva: To the show. Oh, thank you very much.
Zack Arnold: So, I want to start with Kris mainly because the more we talk about Todd, the more embarrassed I’m going to get about how out of shape I am and how inactive I am. So I’m we’re gonna I’m gonna avoid talking to Todd as long as possible because if anybody recognizes his name, he’s the one that’s dominating everybody on the leaderboards. So we’ll we’ll get to Todd a little bit later because he’s got some really interesting stuff to talk about. But I want to start with Kris. So can you tell the audience just a little bit about what specifically you do for Adobe, and then we’ll kind of go into the philosophy of all that and kind of how it can be helpful to other people.
Kris Herrera: Sure. So I manage the global employee services for Adobe, and that means that it’s the wellness program, and food services, and transportation, and just everything that kind of falls into wellness. I started about a year ago, and this was a new position for me. And you know, traditionally in the past, Adobe’s wellness program has come out of HR with the traditional benefits and things like that. And then they created this position to help make the program more than it is. So when I first started, I just started interviewing a bunch of people and said, “What does wellness mean to you? And I got a different answer from every single person. Some people, of course, were fitness focused. Some were spiritual. Some were family, community, all kinds of different definitions. So what I’ve done is I’ve tried to create the program and bring the program together that incorporates something for everybody.
Zack Arnold: And that’s exactly the question that I was going to ask you, which is, what is your definition of wellness? And I’m assuming it’s now become a collection of other people’s definitions along with your own. So, what is your specific definition of wellness?
Kris Herrera: My definition of wellness is whatever makes you happy, and it’s hard to say because I’ve I’ve tried to write down some definitions, and you know it just doesn’t come out right. So for me personally, my definition of wellness is to be fit, to be mentally fit, and to be happy with your family and your life.
Zack Arnold: Okay, I can see that. Now, wellness to me is one of those words that’s like you said, it’s very hard to define. Like an example is, I think, like a week ago, either my son or my daughter, who are five and almost three, one of them said, “What is love? And I’m like, “I don’t really know how to define it. Everybody knows what it is. We know what it feels like, but how do I put it into words for a five year old? And it’s kind of the same thing for wellness, where it’s such an all-encompassing idea that it’s like you almost get this gut feeling that you know what it is, but you can’t really put it into words. So I can absolutely relate to that feeling of kind of that that blank stare of like, ah, what is wellness, right? So when you try to write it down on a piece of paper, it’s not a very concrete thing. The way that I look at the program that I’m putting together for our industry is I talk about this three-legged stool and saying that you can’t pull a leg off of a three-legged stool and expect it to stand up; it’s going to fall to the floor. So I say that my definition of fitness is fitness, nutrition, and wellness, and wellness being an equally weighted leg on that stool. But then I say there’s also like this mini hidden stool within the wellness leg, and my specific perspective on it is not quite as all encompassing in talking about the overarching idea of life. It’s I’m I’m very analytical. So what I talk about when I look at wellness, because I already have fitness and nutrition on their own legs, is I look at stress management and being able to manage daily stress and being able to become less reactive and more proactive about how you react to stress, I look at sleep management and really being able to control control the quality of your sleep and knowing tactics and tips and tricks to be able to make sure that you’re. Getting higher quality sleep, even if you can’t get a larger quantity of sleep, and that’s something that has been transformative for me because I don’t get a ton of sleep as far as the quantity of it, just because of my hours. But even if I come home at one in the morning after just having cut for 14 or 15 hours, I have enough tips now that I can get really deep, good quality sleep. Wake up at 630 or seven with my daughter, and I’m good to go for another 14 hours. So sleep is another component of wellness for me. And then the third one, which is a little bit off the beaten path, is productivity. Because I really feel that if you learn how to become a more productive person and use your time more efficiently, that means that you have more time to spend with family and do the things that make you happy, like you said, be able to go out and take a walk. Like if you’re more efficient with your time and you’re not constantly trying to catch up because you’re always behind, then you have time to do a 15 or 20 minute walk at the office during the day. So that that’s kind of my more analytical version of wellness, but I like yours as well. So, what is your not talking about your job at Adobe because you actually haven’t been there that long, and it’s a pretty new position. What is your background in general as far as health and wellness, and how did you find the job in the first place?
Kris Herrera: So, I’ve worked at some fairly large technology companies doing the same kind of role, and I’ve always liked the well. The food part is actually my favorite part of the wellness program. I manage the corporate food programs, and you can really impact people’s lives a lot by teaching them how to eat healthy and cook healthy, and then they take it home to their families. And so you’re reaching more than just employees through that. So wellness has always been a part of what I’ve done for many many years now, and but it’s it’s always been a struggle because traditionally HR will have the benefits part, and then the facilities will try and have their part, and it’s really hard to bring them together. And the thing that I really like that attracted me about this this job is that we report into HR, so my partner in HR is in the same group as me, and so we work really close together, and it’s really making a difference bringing those programs together so that they don’t seem so connected to the employees. That’s what I like.
Todd Kopriva: I’m glad to hear that you really like the food aspect of your job, Kris, because that’s one of the things that I really appreciate as a consumer of that program and well of the food. It is very easy for us at the big Adobe offices to go up to the cafeteria and get a healthy meal. I can pile a large bowl full of salad with a bunch of different ingredients and pay a really low price for that, and the convenience of being able to do that makes it easy for me to eat healthily. And if something’s not easy, I’m not going to do it as regularly. So I think you guys really nailed that. It makes a big difference for me.
Kris Herrera: Thank you. And some of the things we try to do in the cafe too is is some people don’t want to eat a dish if you call it healthy. So I use the term stealth healthy. You know, you can make dishes with using less salt, or you know, through the recipes, and you don’t have to call them healthy, but they still are for the employees, and those who you know are kind of fighting it. You’re still impacting them.
Zack Arnold: Yeah, and I think that’s a really, really good point because if you basically told everybody at Adobe, well, you either bring your own lunch or you have spinach and tofu every single day. Guess what? Everybody’s going to bring their own lunch, and it’s going to be hot pockets and lean cuisines. And you you have to find a way to make it approachable for people. And I’ve found through my own experience, and also now through the experience of working with my challenge groups for the last year, that if you’re showing them the right foods to eat that are healthy and they’re actually good, then they don’t even want to go back to the crap because they’re like, this stuff actually tastes better and it’s fueling my body and I feel better now. I’m almost terrified of having a pizza or having brownies or whatever it is because they don’t kind of don’t want to crash during the workday and they feel so much better and more productive.
Kris Herrera: I agree. That’s actually how I got into eating more healthy. Is that I worked at a company where the food was free, and so I it was easy for me to try things that I wouldn’t normally try. And I found out, hey, you know, this stuff is pretty good.
Zack Arnold: Yeah, not only is it good, but it’s it’s it’s really good fuel for what we do because it’s it’s not like if let’s say that we were just kind of in in data entry right and I have nothing against people that do data entry but it’s kind of a a mindless job and you go on from nine to five and have your 15 minute breaks and your half hour or your hour launch and you just enter information and then you go home and it’s a job right but people in our industry the vast majority of people that I know, we don’t look at what we do as a job. We look at what we do as a passion, and that passion requires a tremendous amount of energy, and it can burn you out. And what I have found, having been a firsthand experiencer of burnout many, many, many times in my life, a lot of that is related to. Food and it’s so much easier getting through these long marathon stretches of doing a cut on a show or whatever your specific job is. If you’re feeding yourself well and you have easy access to it, you’re able to make it longer and avoid that burnout and do better work and be more pleasant during the experience.
Kris Herrera: I agree.
Zack Arnold: What kind of responses are you seeing? We have Todd saying you know that’s working for him, but on a on a larger scale, since implementing some of these, we’ll we’ll stay specifically with the food part for now. I want to go in other directions too. But as far as the food, what other kind of responses are you seeing, and what changes are you seeing? Haven’t been doing this for a year.
Kris Herrera: You know, it’s all positive. The employees really like it. We’ve done some employee focus groups in the last year because we’re trying to really change our food program. We’ve recently hired an executive chef to come in and and help us. The information that we got from the employees is that they want healthy, but nobody could really define what healthy was in the program. So we do things like competitions between the chefs at the different sites for their recipes, and the employees get to we get to vote on it. We have secret shoppers that go in and rate them, and then those recipes, the winning recipe, is shared at all the other sites. We’re also offering more healthy things through catering, and in our Lehigh site, what we’ve recently done is on our catering ordering page, they can also request somebody to come in and do a stretch break or a fitness break if they’re having an all-day meeting. So it’s all within one system; they don’t have to think about it. Which I think that’s such a great idea. It just started, so I don’t know what the usage is yet. It’s it’s literally like a week old,
Zack Arnold: Right? Yeah, and I think that one thing I definitely want to point out too, from my own personal perspective, is that if anybody listening to this works for Adobe, you have no idea how good you actually have it because this is, as far as I can tell, this is fairly uncommon, especially in the world of working in Hollywood, where I don’t work for a company. I work for a show, or I work for a showrunner, and I jump from show to show to show. So the situation is always different as far as food is concerned. Some shows is just, yep, you get an hour off, figure it out. Other shows they will order lunch, but you have to pay for it, so you don’t have to leave. Other shows will order lunch and they will pay for it, but there’s a budget, and you’re limited to whatever they order, and the kind of the new paradigm that I’m trying to create, which has been a frustrating frustrating process for me, but I think that it will hopefully start to catch on because it is in my office. And if there are other freelancers that are listening to this, I hope that they kind of jump on board. What I basically did is I walked into the post producer, the head of our department on Empire for our show, and I said, “Listen, it’s great that you’re ordering meals out at restaurants for us every single day, and that that’s covered in our budget. But I don’t want to eat out at restaurants every day because I’m not going to be good at what I do, and I’m going to be unhealthy. And over the course of the next six months, like this is going to have a detrimental effect on me. So if there’s a budget for everybody else for X amount of dollars per week. I want that same budget, and I want that to be put towards healthy food for me, and I’ll do all the work. So I go out and I grocery shop for myself, and I cook my own lunches, and they reimburse me for the exact same amount that other employees are having their restaurant meals given to them every single day, and that works really, really well. And now I’m having other people in my crew that are like, “Yeah, I think I’m going to start doing that because I’m getting really tired of eating noodles and Chinese food and Thai food and sandwiches. Like, I just I feel sluggish and I feel crummy. And you know, we see you sitting there eating your freshly cooked salmon and vegetables, and like we want to do that. So for people that are listening to this that don’t have somebody like you at their company giving them healthy meals, that’s one option that I’ve I’ve kind of kind of carved out for myself, and I’m hoping that that idea will start to you know take flight a little bit more. But what I’d like to do is talk a little bit about fitness because you mentioned that a little bit, and the idea of having stretch breaks. So, what are some of the things that you have implemented on the more activity fitness side? Because I’ve I’ve heard several of the things you’ve implemented, but I’d like you to talk about them specifically.
Kris Herrera: The one that’s had the most impact since I’ve started here is that we have a Fitbit program. So we decided that we would purchase. Well, we wouldn’t purchase. We would make available Fitbits for all the employees in the U.S. to buy. So each employee can buy two Fitbits at no cost, and then they can buy more if they want that are heavily discounted, but that we don’t subsidize. So normally we have wellness dollars that employees can use each year for whatever they want, employees who are at sites that don’t have fitness centers, they can use it for gym membership or chiropractic, whatever you choose to do. But it’s normally not for equipment, and we made the exception for this so that employees can get them for free. And then we take that. So we had 70-5% of our employees participate in this program and buy at least one. So now we’re doing challenges around it. We’ll do company challenges once a quarter, where we’ll walk a certain distance, or you know, one of the ones that I’m putting together now is have people walk between the different offices in the U.S. and base it on on steps. Yeah, it’s going to be way fun.
Zack Arnold: So that’s like walking from the San Jose office to the Seattle office,
Kris Herrera: Right?
Zack Arnold: That’s quite a walk.
Kris Herrera: It is quite a walk.
Zack Arnold: Are you are you guys using the the actual Fitbit leaderboards and doing like internal competitions with your own private groups?
Kris Herrera: Yes. So there’s two ways to do it. So I have a corporate reporting where I can see all of the U.S. So I can do incentives by office, by region, by internal leader. But then there’s a lot of organic competitions growing too. Where if I have a friends list of 20 people, I can do my own competition. For instance, I sit in an open office area here, and my friends on Fitbit are all right here, and it’s really become competitive. You know, we’ll be on a conference call, and you’ll see people walking around, and they’ll look at me and tap their Fitbit, and you know, to say I’m getting my steps in while I’m talking on the phone, and created some good competition between the people.
Zack Arnold: Yeah, and speaking of that, what a great segue to go over to Todd, because Todd is one of the dominators on the Fitness and Post leaderboard, and I would love to find a way to try and synergize between the types of leaderboards that you guys have and the main fitness and post leaderboard, because I’m trying to do the exact same thing for the whole post production industry, basically worldwide. And the guy that’s just embarrassing me on a daily basis is on the other end of this call. So, so that’s a good segue into Todd because Todd is the the Fitbit dominator.
Todd Kopriva: That is not actually true. Graham is usually ahead of me, so I’m number two. the The
Zack Arnold: Ironic thing about that is, and I don’t know if this is the case anymore, but the reason that Graham dominates is because he’s learning Adobe products on his iPad and watching tutorials on the treadmill all day long.
Todd Kopriva: Ah, because I asked him, I
Zack Arnold: Said, “I have a treadmill in front of my desk, and how are you getting double the amount of steps of me every day? He’s like, “Oh yeah, I’m I’m learning a bunch of Adobe products, and I just watch tutorials on my iPad all day long on my treadmill. So like, ah, that’s the secret. So Adobe’s behind all of this.
Todd Kopriva: Yeah. So about oh, it’s a little bit more than two years ago. I took a hard look at myself and realized that I was overweight. I’m six three, and I think that I was about 280 at the time, and I was a somewhat athletic 280 I trained in martial arts, specifically in Wing Chun, so I was still being active, but the the Wing Chun was not really getting me a lot of calorie burning, and so sitting in front of a desk all day, in front of a computer all day at a desk, was just making me gain weight, and I wasn’t eating as well as I I could be. So that’s when I got a Fitbit. This is before Adobe had the the program. I just got one on my own, and I started doing a few things, all of which the Fitbit made it easy to do, tracking my steps, obviously, but also, and this is the thing that made a big difference for me that I didn’t expect. They have a really easy way for you to log your food intake, and I thought that I was eating somewhat healthily. I thought that I was eating at a rate that would cause me to not gain weight or even maybe lose some. But when I was entering my food, I could actually see the calorie counts according to this web app, and I realized that the salad that I was eating for lunch, which is all that I would have for lunch, is a is a big salad. The salad is what was killing me, because instead of putting dressing on the salad, which I knew was a no-no, I would just put a dollop of potato salad on the top.
Zack Arnold: Oh my!
Todd Kopriva: And that potato salad, of course, is largely mayonnaise, and that was five or 600 calories. And I thought, oh, that’s what’s happening. And so, really, for me, the big aha moment was so trivially simple, but I was blind to it until a computer program told me, “Hey, dude, that’s like a pound per week that you’re gaining just on potato salad. So I stopped putting potato salad on my salad, and my weight stabilized. And then I started walking more and then running more. My wife was going to be competing in her first marathon, and I was going to go help out as her support crew. And I knew that that would mean that I would be covering some of the miles just to sort of run between the various checkpoints. So I wanted to be ready for that. So I was doing more running, and my weight was coming down. And I thought, hey, this this combination of monitoring my steps and monitoring my food intake is really doing me a lot of good. And I’m about 235 now, so that’s what about 45 pounds difference. So I attribute it almost entirely to those two things: getting a lot of steps in, either walking or running. And just paying attention to how much I’m eating.
Zack Arnold: Yeah, and I think that that’s the the component of the program, the fitness and post program that I try to emphasize so much. This is the this is step two, which I call track everything. And I don’t believe that we should all become biohackers and we should all permanently have Bluetooth devices attached to our body. And that that’s not the approach that I take at all. However, I feel that there’s so much awareness that you build of your own choices and habits once you start to track them, and kind of what what you measure you can improve upon is a really important phrase to me because you can’t really know what to fix if you don’t know where the problem is, and if you have quantified data that says, “Oh my God, I’m only getting 2,300 steps per day, and I’m eating 3,500 calories per day, and I’m not a proponent of calories in, calories out. I don’t think that’s the path to long-term health. However, when you’re aware of your calorie intake versus your calorie expenditure, then you start to realize that there might be a huge imbalance that you need to fix, and that’s what this response that I get from most of my group members is they say, you know, this isn’t something I want to do for the rest of my life, but the awareness that I’ve gained of my choices and what that has done to empower me to make better choices and thus feel better is an amazing, amazing feeling. So that’s why I’m such a big proponent of these tracking devices, and that is kind of one of the hidden secrets of the Fitbit is that it does do diet tracking, food tracking, calorie tracking. The reason that I advocate my Fitness Pal is just because it’s more robust. I feel that they have a deeper library of food that’s already entered, so it makes the process easier. And there’s a little bit more as far as the data analysis, kind of digging into your macronutrients and your micronutrients. So it’s not that Fitbit doesn’t do it. It’s just I feel MyFitnessPal does it better because they’re the industry leader. But if somebody says I don’t want to do all that stuff, Fitbit will do all of it for you. So it’s a really really easy process.
Kris Herrera: You can also have your Fitbit data feed into MyFitnessPal and a whole bunch of other apps like that. So you can choose the one that works best for you, but still have your activity data feed in
Zack Arnold: Exactly. And that’s the really cool thing, and that’s what I do with my challenge group members. Is I I give them tutorials for how to link these apps, so you can go into MyFitnessPal and say, “Oh wow, I’ve had 2300 calories today, and that’s largely from carbohydrates, and there’s a lot of sugar. Oh, but look! I just ran a 40-mile marathon today, and I burned 70-800 calories. So maybe it’s not so bad today, right? Because all that information is there mathematically in front of you. So all of these apps now talk to each other, and there’s a way to kind of integrate all of it. I have three different apps that I have synced all the time. I have Fitbit, I have my Fitness Pal, and I have DigiFit, which is kind of the the souped up version for athletes, where you can wear a continuous heart rate monitor and actually get your Acura calorie burn and get a GPS map of whatever your run was or your ride was, whatever the activity was, and I can say, oh wow, at mile two and a half, I can see that this was my heart rate and this was my zone. So you can really geek out in this stuff and go really, really deep if that’s the level that you choose to go. So I realized that I kind of neglected Todd a little bit because I didn’t get a formal introduction from you, and you’re kind of a celebrity in the the world of visual effects.
Todd Kopriva: Celebrity, wow! I I didn’t realize that. Well, when when you’re a geek
Zack Arnold: Like me, like for for example, to me, like Al Mooney is the Elvis of post production, right? Like he’s everywhere. He’s always talking about premiere. Kind of everybody knows Al Mooney, knows his personality. And my understanding is, and you can correct me if I’m wrong, but you’re kind of Al Mooney’s counterpart to the After Effects side of things, correct?
Todd Kopriva: Yeah, that’s correct. I’m the product manager for visual effects and motion graphics software at Adobe, and of course, to most people, that mostly just means After Effects.
Zack Arnold: What other components are there to the the side of it? Because I’m going to be honest, I kind of thought it was just After Effects too. So sorry about that.
Todd Kopriva: Oh, no problem. Last year at Adobe Max. We had a demo of a new character animation application called Project Animal, where you can perform in front of a webcam with a microphone, and a cartoon character will be animated according to your facial movements and lip synced to you, and basically just match your performance. And you can use whatever Illustrator artwork or Photoshop artwork you want for your character, so you can create your own cartoon character and just make it perform, and it’ll animate according to your performance.
Zack Arnold: Wow, that’s really cool. So that that’s a. I’m assuming you’re probably not going to replace Pixar with that anytime soon, but it sounds like it kind of it kind of brings a similar technology to the masses. It
Todd Kopriva: Does bring a very accessible technology to the masses, but also we’ve talked with a lot of the professional animation houses, and we anticipate them using it to to replace a lot of the tedious manual work that they do for things like lip sync.
Zack Arnold: Oh, that’s a I could see that. So it’s kind of like a supplemental tool. It’s not an all. One, we’re going to animate our whole film with it, but you can take very specific tasks and say this is now going to work for this.
Todd Kopriva: Yeah, that’s that’s the way we’re aiming it.
Zack Arnold: I see. All right, so let’s talk a little bit about you specifically, Todd. And I know I was making jokes about how you’re dominating on the leaderboard, but you were a little bit too humble in kind of describing your journey to becoming healthier because it’s not that you’re walking more and eating healthier food. You’ve kind of become an ultra endurance athlete. Is that correct?
Todd Kopriva: Yes, I would actually say re becoming. Back when I was a teenager, I competed in marathons and ultra marathons. My favorite race was the 24 hour run, which is a race in which you simply go as far as you can in 24 hours, usually around a relatively short loop. And the reason that I really like the 24-hour run is that it felt more like just a competition with yourself, because since you’re going around a loop, you can’t really tell who’s ahead of you and who’s not. It’s all about how far you can go, and also because the 20-four hour runs and similar timed runs happen around a tight loop, everybody’s kind of close together, and so you can have a little micro community form with the people that you’re spending this long period of athletic activity with. I’ve actually got a run coming up in two weeks on march 14, which is on Pi Day, and it’s a 12-hour run around a three-mile loop in Seattle, and because it’s on Pi Day, the aid stations are all going to be stocked with Pi, so that’s going to be fun. Yes,
Zack Arnold: That’s not Fitness and Post approved, by the way.
Todd Kopriva: So back when I was doing this in high school, I enjoyed it, but I fell out of it. And like I said, too much work and not enough attention to my fitness just sort of accumulated over time, such that I needed to address the situation. And so I’ve basically gone back to the thing that I knew from my youth, which is just covering a lot of miles. And recently, you mentioned Brazil. A friend of mine, who is a much more accomplished endurance runner, she’s an elite athlete who often wins ultra marathons, asked me if I would like to be part of her support staff for an ultra marathon in Brazil. It’s a 175 mile race, and so I went down to be one of her pacers for this race, of course, in order to be a pacer for an elite ultra marathoner, one has to train. So I spent the two months before the race just running up and down the hills of Seattle to make sure that I could keep up with her for at least short periods. And so went down to Brazil and competed in that race in January. And so, if you saw a spike in my my steps in January, that’s why.
Zack Arnold: Which I did, which freaked me out. Like where, like there aren’t enough hours in the day to get this many steps. If you are going 24 hours, and then I realize that oh, you kind of are.
Todd Kopriva: Yeah, my last 24 hour race was in October, in Indiana. So if you saw a big spike in October. That was that was that.
Zack Arnold: Yes, I I remember those spikes, and like I said, they’re just diminishing my my self worth every single day. Thinking, oh, I’m I’m running this new fitness program for post production, and oh my god, I’m getting my ass kicked. What is going on here?
Todd Kopriva: So you asked me a somewhat jesting question that actually has some seriousness to it in the chat on our challenge, which is how do you do this, and it’s actually not that hard as long as you’re willing to commit to it. So what I do is, any day when I can walk to work, I do. But a lot of days I’m too busy to walk to work because I need to get in early for a meeting. So I’ll take the bus to work, or I’ll drive to work on that day. But at the end of the day, if I have time, I’ll walk home from work. And so, either one or two of the legs of my commute, I will try to do each day. And that right there is several miles. But then on the weekends, I’ll try to get in a long run on Saturday, and so I can work that in with my work schedule pretty easily, but then another large slice of my steps comes during the workday because I I like to keep myself moving. You may have heard the same results that I heard a couple of years ago about a sedentary lifestyle, one in which you’re sitting at work, can be as dangerous to you as smoking, as far as the health detriment. And as soon as I heard that, I thought, “Wow, I have to make sure that I’m not sitting too much because that scared me. So I make sure that about once an hour, I get up and just take a little walk-not a big walk, just I walk around the building. And our building isn’t very large. That’s maybe a five-minute walk, but if I do that once an hour over the course of an eight or 10-hour workday, that’s like going out and taking an hour-long walk. So sprinkling that through the day gets a lot of steps in, gets me some calories burned. But I think what it does that’s even more significant is it loosens me up, and I don’t just. I mean, in terms of my body, I mean, in terms of my mind, I’m not just staring at the computer screen, getting into a rut with my blinders on, my body stiffening up, getting tense. If I just get up and move around, I feel more relaxed. I think my mind opens up a little bit more. I can be more creative. I think I’m a nicer person when I do that, I’m not sitting there all clenched when I’m responding to email or talking to somebody on the phone. So that’s a really big part of it for me too.
Zack Arnold: Yeah, and this will actually kind of segue nice into Kris. But for those that are listening that don’t know, this is basically my entire mantra when it comes to fitness. There’s a side of fitness that is you take 30 to 40-five minutes a day, you dedicate it to intense exercise and doing P90X or being on the elliptical or taking a run, but that’s just not realistic for everybody in our industry, and that’s why I’m I’ve really advocated so much, just trying to be active throughout the day and take these activity breaks. And Kris, I don’t know if you’re aware of it or if Adobe’s aware of it, but there’s a program called the Sitting Solution that I discovered about six months ago that has kind of become the holy grail of my entire program. And this is basically an ebook program that was designed by physical therapists that gives you these 45 minute to hour long stretch breaks all day long. But it’s not just get up and walk around the office. It’s actually stretching exercises that are specifically designed to reverse the negative adaptations that your body makes to sitting all day because we’re hunched over and we’re in you know poor positions ergonomically, and over the course of time, over years and years and years, those adaptations add up negatively and cause a lot of health problems. Which, as I’m sure you know, you have people with lower back issues and knee issues and hip issues, and a lot of that can be reversed by simply doing these sitting exercises. The link for this, if anybody’s interested, just go to fitnessandpost.com/ 27 That’s my podcast with the creators of it. When I found this, it was like the skies opened up and the angels sung to me because it’s like, oh my god, this is something I wanted to create, but I’m not a physical therapist. I’m an editor, and these guys are pros. And it’s just the the easiest thing to implement, and I do it every single day. And like you said, Todd, it limbers me up physically, but also mentally, and it gives me more energy, and I get through these longer days with ease. So that’s something you can certainly share with them with your Adobe employees. But I also know that you guys have other things you’ve implemented as far as hardware, like desks and treadmills and such. So talk a little bit of it more about what you’re doing to make sure that people are staying active outside of just tracking their activity.
Kris Herrera: So we do a few things. One of the things we do is we provide sit stand desks so that people don’t sit all day, and you you see a lot of people using the stand option on it, which is really great. One thing that we’re just starting in San Francisco that I think is fabulous is that we’re fitting out a conference room with treadmills and bikes, so that you can have a meeting and everybody in there is on a treadmill or a bike. It’s not started yet; it’s just in progress. But I think that it’s going to be really popular, and I see you know more and more of that kind of option going on. We also do incentives, like we’re doing a stairwell campaign in San Jose. We’re in a downtown setting, and it’s three towers that are 18 stories, so you live in elevators. What we’re doing is we’re going to encourage people to use the stairwells, and you know, put some incentives around it. Like if we catch you taking the stair, then you know maybe you win a small prize or whatever, and we’ll create some competitions around that. So you know a lot of different things to try and keep people moving. In San Francisco, we have a walking treadmill desk right now, and it’s you know becoming more and more popular as people find it. So hopefully Todd was able to go take a look at it yesterday.
Todd Kopriva: I did not.
Kris Herrera: That’s fine. Todd was too
Zack Arnold: Busy walking to work getting his 40,000 steps in for the day.
Kris Herrera: That’s right.
Zack Arnold: Obviously, for anybody that has listened to the show before or gone to the website, they know that I am so on the same page with this because the the catalyst for my entire shift towards better health and finding a way to survive in this industry was a standing desk, and that was an investment that I made. I think it was like seven or eight years ago now, and it was a huge investment seven or eight years ago. You couldn’t just go to IKEA and get a motorized standing desk. I paid like $3,000 for a top of the line height adjustable desk because to me it was like buying a car. It’s like when you buy a car, you’re like, well, this is a purchase I’m only going to make once every five or 10 years, and in the case of a desk, it’s like maybe once in 30 years. And I said that I don’t want to just buy a standing desk and then realize that I don’t want to stand all day, so I got a height adjustable desk, and that made a huge, huge difference for me. But what I didn’t realize back then is that if you’re just going to stand all day, that even that isn’t terribly healthy because your body is still making a lot of negative adaptations from being sedentary. And of course, it’s better than sitting all day, but it’s still not the be all, end all, and that’s why. I’m so happy to hear that you’re doing the height adjustable versions because that’s what keeps people moving all day long and changing their positions. I’m like a squirrel in my office. I never am in the same position for more than 45 minutes at a time, and I’ve actually trained myself to just kind of intrinsically know when it’s 45 minutes because I do. I use Pomodoro apps and I have timers go off that say it’s been 40-five minutes. You need to change positions, and I’ll do a sitting solution break, and I’ll walk around the office for five minutes, and then maybe I’ll sit on a you know an inflated ball chair for 40-five minutes. Maybe I’ll walk on the treadmill. Maybe I’ll just stand. But there’s always all these different options, and if you decide I want to stand at my desk and you get a fixed standing desk. It’s a step forwards, but it’s not the be all and all.
Todd Kopriva: Yeah, I find that rather than doing it on time, I do it by task. So I have an inflatable ball in my office. I have a somewhat comfy armchair. I have a standing desk, and I move between those with my laptop when I’m doing different tasks, so when I’m doing precision tasks that require my desktop workstation, I’m sitting at a regular chair in front of a desktop workstation. When I’m responding to email, I’m typically sitting in the the comfy chair with my laptop in my lap, and so on. So throughout the day, as I’m doing various kinds of tasks. I’m moving from position to position, and that keeps me from stiffening up in any one of those bad postures. I heard a piece of advice once that was attributed to someone at Pixar. Apparently, they have an ergonomics expert, and someone asked them, “What is the best pointing device? You know, they were looking for an answer like trackball or mouse, but the answer that this person gave was whichever one you’re not currently using, and I thought that was the best advice because with any repetitive stress injury or with any sort of posture-related stiffening injury, the the solution is change it up, and so with pointing devices, I go between a mouse and a trackball and a trackpad and a pen. With my sitting and standing position, I’m moving between several throughout the course of the day, and it’s just the changeup that I think is making all the difference for me.
Zack Arnold: Yeah, I think that’s that’s a huge component to to focus on as well because I do the same thing where I have a Wacom tablet and I have an Apple trackpad. I don’t even have a mouse anymore because I just found that using a mouse is causing all kinds of problems. And I got to the point where I had to see an orthopedist, and they said I needed surgery on my wrist because I had cysts building up. And I just said, I don’t want to cut myself open unless it’s absolutely necessary. I just want to find ways to reverse these adaptations, and by switching up my workstation and having different options in different places, literally the pain is gone, the cyst is gone, and I didn’t have to do anything invasive, and there was no pain, and it didn’t cost me any money. I just had to change up my environment.
Todd Kopriva: Something that I did, which might sound a little daunting, but I think it might be worth a try, is when I was finding that I was getting severe RSI in my right arm and hand. I switched to using my left hand at work and my right hand at home when I was using computer devices, and that took a while to get used to because it’s hard to switch to being a left-handed person. But I found that by dedicating myself to it for a few months, I was good enough with my left hand that I could get my work done, and that totally saved my right hand. I no longer have any problems with RSI just after making that adaptation.
Zack Arnold: And that does sound daunting, but not nearly as daunting as running for 24 hours. So if I had to choose between the two, I’ll learn how to use the trackpad with my left hand. So I want to switch gears a little bit. Actually, you know what? Before we switch gears, I want to extend a fun little challenge to people that are specifically in your world because you were saying that when you’re doing these really you know graphic intensive tasks, you’re sitting at your workstation. I want people that are visual effects artists to try and do rotoscoping while on the treadmill because that’s that’s a fun exercise and I’ve done that and I’m I’m not a good rotoscoper but I have to do a fair amount of rotoscoping and tracking for doing like crappy temp shots and all visual effects artists know these where you get lock picture and they start sending the the effects and it’s a you know like a it’s like a text message that’s comped within a phone and it kind of does that like bouncy thing. I’m the guy that’s good enough to do the bouncy tracking, but I can’t do the real tracking. But there’s something very, very fun about trying to rotoscope and trace around somebody when you’re on your treadmill. So just throwing that out there. Somebody’s looking for a way to spice up their day, and they want to get activity. Just yeah, rotoscope while on the treadmill. I’m not saying you’re going to do a good job, but it is kind of fun. But anyway, now I will segue, and what I want to talk about now specifically with Kris, and of course Todd, you’re welcome to join. But if I’m listening to this, and I’m either an editor, a visual effects artist, or more importantly, a post producer, an associate producer, and I say this is. The opposite of the world that I live in. I live in a world where everybody’s sitting, and they’re bringing me pizza for dinner every single day, and I feel trapped. What are some suggestions that you would have for people? Not so much from the personal level, like oh, we’ll eat healthier, get activity, but if you want to try and change the culture, and you’re somebody that’s making these decisions, and you’re you’re running your your post production office. What are some things that that you can do to start going more towards the Adobe culture and away from just kind of the standard way that we’ve been doing this for so long?
Kris Herrera: Well, that’s somewhat of a hard question for me. You know, we have people that you know are sitting at their desk all day, but then others that are very active. I think that in addition to the fitness things that we’ve been talking about, there’s a lot of the mental things that you could do to help when you’re not being active. There’s meditation. You know, a lot of people are are doing that now. We have a huge meditation group in a few of the sites here. We have, you know, there’s massage. There’s things that you can do off hours that’ll help you feel better when you are stuck sitting for hours on end. That’s a little hard for me. I’m sorry.
Zack Arnold: That’s okay. Let me ask you a little bit different question and possibly rephrase it. Is there any kind of a public site that you have available that kind of lays out some of the things that you’ve implemented, and you can look at and say, “Oh, here’s a roadmap for things that I can do for my department. So rather than like, I think that meditation and massage; those are fantastic suggestions. But if I’m looking at it more from a policy perspective and saying I want to change my office, but I need to give concrete examples of things that we can do, do you guys have any type of site or anywhere that somebody could look, or resources that you use where you get ideas and say, here are things from a policy perspective that we can share with our office, and I can give to my boss or whatever it is to say I’ve had enough and I want to learn more and show them that this can be done.
Kris Herrera: Some of our programs are on our public site. You can go and look at them. The way that I find programs is I belong to a few organizations that where I meet with other wellness people and we just talk about what the companies are providing and what people are doing and what the the new trends are. It’s hard to put a policy around that because you have to really look at your company, but you can copy from a lot of the. I personally use Stanford as a resource. There’s a health promotion network that I belong to that a lot of people go to, and I can talk to my colleagues and see what’s going on. So I think that you have to have somebody who is willing to just go out and search out the new ideas. It’s there’s no policy. Ours is more programs that we provide because that’s what our employees want. We don’t try and copy what other companies are doing. We try and do what we want to do.
Zack Arnold: Yeah, and I think the policy was probably a poor choice of words because I I try to really emphasize that fitness and post is not dogma, and I’m not saying everybody needs to be doing all these same activities. So policy is not the right word, but having the options, you know, like because there are so many people that I’m sure working in posts that are saying, “God, I’d I’d love to be able to go to the cafeteria and get a healthy meal, and I’d love to have a Fitbit provided to me and a standing adjustable workstation. But you know, it’s this is a slow, slow, slow moving culture. I mean, we’re we’re basically trying to push a boulder up a mountain in this industry. So I’m I’m just trying to offer ways that people can say, hey, well, here’s something that has already been done, and here’s some of the results. So, if you wouldn’t mind, maybe you could send me a couple of links to like the the Stanford site or to the public Adobe site, and I can put those links in the show notes, so somebody can just say, see, other people are doing this, and this is working.
Todd Kopriva: I think that it’s important to realize that a lot of these changes can happen through just simple example. So I’ll just use one example. If you’re in a meeting and everybody’s sitting around a conference table, don’t be afraid to not sit. You know, stand behind your chair and maybe even you know stretch your legs a little bit while you’re standing there, and and move around a little bit. People might think you’re a little bit weird, and somebody might even ask, “Hey, why aren’t you sitting down? And you might just say, “You know, I’ve been sitting too much at my desk. I need to sort of loosen up a little bit, so I’m just going to stretch a little bit here while we talk. That might seem strange the first time, but and I actually saw this happen within my group at Adobe a few years ago. One person was doing that, and then two people were doing it, and then four people were doing it until, at a standard staff meeting of 10 or 11 people, four or five people would be standing around the room instead of sitting, and it wasn’t considered unusual. So don’t be afraid to be that first person that stands up and stretches a little bit when everybody else is sitting. And if if pizza is being ordered, you might not be able to make the demand, but you might be able to make the request. Just say, hey, if you’re getting pizza, could you also get some salads too? Maybe they’ll say no, but asking doesn’t hurt, and it. Sort of build slowly the example and the culture that that’s the way that you want things to be.
Zack Arnold: Yeah, and that that’s what this program is all about. That’s the number one thing that I tell all the people that decide to join my team and help out, kind of build this program with me. As I say, there’s only one rule other than we don’t talk about Fight Club, is that you have to lead by example. Like if you’re not the example and showing people how to do it, and you’re giving them this information, and you’re not doing it yourself, you cannot be a part of my team. Outside of that, I don’t care. I don’t care how bad a shape you’re in now. I don’t care what level of fitness or what you’re eating. All I care is that you’re making the changes and implementing them yourself, and you’re leading by example. And people see that, and that’s contagious. It’s like it’s like a yawn. Somebody stands up and starts to stretch. You’re like, oh, that actually looks like it’s more comfortable than me sitting in my air-on chair right now. So then they do it, and I do this at mixed sessions, and it kind of drives people crazy. But I can’t sit down for more than 20 or 30 minutes until my back starts to hurt and I’m uncomfortable and I’m squirrely and I just can’t do it. And when you’re in a mixed playback session, sometimes those go for three or four hours, even before the playback of a 40-two minute episode is over. I’m standing, and everybody else is sitting, and it’s kind of uncomfortable. And then all of a sudden, we’ll be in the middle of notes, and I’ll be sitting there doing like a yoga twist pose on the ground, like sitting on the floor, and they keep looking back, and their eye line has to keep changing because they think I’m sitting. Like, oh, oh, you’re standing. Oh, wait, you’re on the floor. But I feel so much better, and I don’t walk out of those four-hour mix sessions totally sluggish. Whereas I used to, because I conformed to the standard of well, I need to sit in my air-on chair and be a good little boy. And it’s just like enough is enough. And now, like you said, I’ll see somebody else will just kind of stand up and do a little side twist and put their arms up and they’re starting to realize that oh wait this actually feels better you know
Kris Herrera: That’s great we have a lot of meetings like that that go for hours and hours and it’s just like you said it just takes one person to get up and start moving and then other people know that it’s okay
Zack Arnold: Well and there’s also plenty of science now to back up this idea that having standing meetings or active meetings is so much more productive, because I don’t think there are a lot of things that are less productive than a meeting of people sitting around a table and talking. Like studies just prove this over and over and over that if you want to be efficient and have the highest level of productivity in your organization, the more meetings you have, the less productive you are, and the less things get done. But there are circumstances and departments where having meetings is absolutely essential. And the biggest change that people make to increase their productivity is having standing meetings or having active meetings, where they rather than sitting at a conference table, they walk around the block together. I mean, I prefer to do meetings that way with people, where you know if I say, “Well, let’s have a meeting, and they’re like, “We’ll come to my office, I’m like, “Why don’t we have lunch and we can walk from your office to where the place is? And then you have half your meeting on the way to lunch, and it’s just more active and engaging because you just feel better and you’re not dealing with all kinds of brain fog.
Kris Herrera: Right, I agree.
Zack Arnold: So we’re winding down to the end here, and I know that both of you have to run to your jobs at Adobe, and Todd literally will be running to his job at Adobe. So I just want to make sure that people know where they can go if they want to learn more about what either of you is doing, or if there’s just somewhere that you want to send people to an Adobe site in general, just so they can you know learn a little bit more. And I’ll also get those links from you, Kris, and make sure they’re in the show notes. I’ll have a link for the the show notes in the beginning and the end of the episode. But I don’t know what episode this is as we’re recording live, so I can’t do that yet. But where can people find both of you if they want to kind of get involved to learn more about what you guys are doing?
Kris Herrera: So I’m on LinkedIn. It’s Kris Waffler Herrera on LinkedIn. That’s probably the best place to find me.
Todd Kopriva: So probably the easiest way to talk to me is over Twitter at Todd Capriva underscore AE.
Zack Arnold: Okay, and I think that what I really would like to do is find some way to to build synergy with all of the leaderboards that you’re building in Adobe and integrating that with Fitness and Posts because that’s that to me is one of my babies that I’ve been nurturing from the ground up is that Fitbit leaderboard. If I’ve got a whole bunch of crazy stuff that I’m doing with the fitness and post program, and it’s so much experimentation and seeing what sticks to the wall and what doesn’t, but the two babies for me are the podcast and the Fitbit leaderboard, and the fact that you guys have built something so similar, I just I can’t see any reason why we couldn’t find a way to to start building that together because I think there’s no more forward-thinking company in this industry to me than Adobe. I love the other companies that are in it, but I just there’s so much forward-thinking from Adobe that I’m very very excited that that you guys are supporting this program and that I can help to support what you guys are doing too.
Todd Kopriva: Yeah, thanks for putting all this together.
Zack Arnold: Yeah, absolutely. It’s it’s been a lot of fun, and I would not be able to do it without the enthusiasm of people like you, Todd, showing that it can be done, and people like you, Kris, who are helping to share with. I mean, I don’t know how many employees Adobe has, but I’m sure it’s 1000s and 1000s. Like letting them know that you know, working in an industry behind a computer doesn’t have to be unhealthy anymore. So it’s. I’m excited to to find companies and people like you that that understand my mission and don’t think that I’m completely crazy. Although caveat, I actually am.
