Desk Workout Powershell

I work in IT, which means I have the opportunity to sit for about 7-8 hours a day. I hate this. Therefore I try to run over my lunch break, I purchased a desk cycle to pedal while I am sitting, and recently I added another tool to my Battle the Sedentary work lifestyle toolbox: Weights.

Me and a buddy started doing some weight trainnig at the desk. We brought in a pair of 25 pound dumbbells and a pair of 10 pound dumbbells. Now we are doing some weight training at our desk by executing burnout sets (as many as you can lift) with various exercises.

A frequency of every hour was decided on meaning at the top of every hour we would complete a burnout set of an exercise in a round robin format. Of course some days you get head down in some work and sometimes may forget to execute your burnout set. Therefore we had a need to build some kind of notification system to remind us its time to workout.

Sample Desk Wrokout Toast Notification

Thus the DeskWorkout2.ps1 script was built. The first version would pop up an HTML file based on what exercise was up in the list. This worked ok for a while, but I was looking for an excuse to use Windows 10 Toast Notifications. So I started searching around for a solution.

Python

I quickly found a python solution that would create a Windows tosat notification. It is really straight forward and simple.



The original Desk Workout script was written in PowerShell so I searched for a PowerShell solution as well.

PowerShell

The PowerShell solution was created using the BurntToast Module available on Github. Since the original script was already created in PowerShell I went ahead with the PowerShell version. The Powershell Version allowed me to put a picture in there too, so that was cool.

I wrapped the Script with an hour of sleep. So now all I have to is remember to turn it on in the morning. I stored the various excercises in a local database and wrote a stored procedure to advance through the various workouts.