[wolfgoatcabbage]

On the other hand, sitting in a chair all day could be construed as physically insulting. Two counters:

1) There's no reason exercise by nature has to be boring or free of intellect. Physics greatly applies to freestyle snowboarding, for instance, and the adrenaline is top-shelf. Not to mention the scenery and vitamin D! Gymnastic and weightlifting activities in general encourage a practical understanding of leverage, torque, moment arms, etc.

2) Even without choosing exciting sports and applying your scientific knowledge to them, why not walk on a treadmill while you work, or sit on a recumbent bike as you watch that 3rd convolutional neural net video? It's an easy way to up your circulation while taking in knowledge and alleviates boredom.

[fao_]

> Not to mention the scenery and vitamin D!

As far as I can tell, typical snowboarding gear consists of a thick jacket, long trousers (or somesuch), with goggles and a snow hat. To produce Vitamin D the light has to actually come in contact with the skin.

[saiya-jin]

there are much cooler activities than that, and ones you can actually do all year around, not just few weeks if weather/snowfall permits (realistically it shrinks to couple of weekends/a week for most people).

- sport climbing - you wouldn't believe how cool and stimulating the sport is, switch indoor/boulder when weather is bad. cool people in community too

- mix of backcountry skiing in winter and hiking anytime else will give you huge amounts of nature that is very relaxing on the mind (easy rule - the more mind works daily, the more body workout it needs to relax, and vice versa)

[rpcope1]

Another super fun, pretty intellectual form of sports/exercise is climbing. It always seeming like the physics and engineering types gravitate towards it, and I can attest it's another excellent way to get some exercise and to have some fun working on "problems".

As tech workers, I think I would even beyond sitting in a chair all day being physically insulting, to say that it's perhaps one of the greatest (and really a non-trivial one) occupational hazards we face.