Jean Galea

Should You Switch to a Standing Desk?

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For the last few years, I’ve been coming across articles extolling the benefits of standing desks. Due to being a digital nomad, however, I’ve found it difficult to actually get one and try it out. Finally, in our condo building in Chiang Mai (Thailand), I found the perfect place to experiment with standing desks.

This was the first experiment with working standing up. In Chiang Mai I got the opportunity to switch between a standing desk and a traditional seated desk in the same office.

Claimed Benefits of Standing Desks

Before I share my experience, let’s take a look at the claimed benefits of standing desks:

  • More energy
  • Improved posture
  • Reduced risk of diseases (cancer, diabetes)
  • Lower long-term mortality risk

Perhaps more worryingly is the fact that research has indicated that sitting is killing us, shortening our lifespans by up to 15 years. Sitting has also been referred to as the new smoking in terms of harmful effects.

Many people try to restore balance in their lives by sitting for six hours at work and then heading to the gym afterward, however, this does not seem to do the trick. Evidence suggests that the negative effects of extended sitting can’t be countered by brief bouts of strenuous exercise.

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Visiting or Staying, You Will Say ‘Barcelona is Beautiful’

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This is a sponsored post from our friends at HousingAnywhere.

Spain has much to offer its tourists and locals. It is a country chock full of history and culture, and no better place to visit, or live in, than one of its major cities – Barcelona.

Being one of the country’s major cities, Barcelona has several of the most iconic Spanish landmarks. In fact, they never run out of it. That is why when people visit the place, some have loads of stories to tell, and that is why in some cases, others decide to look for housing for rent in Barcelona.

What are some of the hotspots in Barcelona that would make you want to stay?

  • Sagrada Familia

An ongoing project since 1882, the Sagrada Familia is still under construction to this day. Interrupted so many times, it has now been made a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Through private donations, it has passed its midpoint by 2010, and is currently still under construction.

If you want to witness history in the making, literally, then, you may find housing for rent in Barcelona. Of course, if you do not want to experience the loud noises from the construction, you can wait until 2026, when it is expected to finally take its final shape.

  • Columbus Monument

If you are an American, you might want to see the man responsible for the discovery of your country. Just around the lower end of La Rambla, Barcelona, is a 197 ft statue of Christopher Columbus. This was erected to commemorate the first voyage of Columbus down in Americas. In addition, he is shown pointing towards the direction of the New World to where he travelled to discover which eventually became the United States of America.

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Best Luxury Real Estate Agencies and Developers in Spain

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In recent years I’ve taken quite an interest in real estate, and I’ve been learning the ropes by investing through crowdfunding platforms such as Housers in Spain/Italy/Portugal, Property Partner in the UK and iFunded in Germany.

I also love checking out what’s on the market. I have always loved great design, and buildings are one of the most obvious incarnations of design that we see and interact with on an everyday basis. Unfortunately, there are so badly designed buildings, especially where I grew up in Malta, but also in other countries of course. I, therefore, love when I come across amazing properties and so it’s become a kind of hobby to keeps tabs on amazing apartments and properties, especially in Spain where I now reside.

For anyone else who is interested, I’ll be keeping this list of awesome developers or agencies that I come across. Mostly they deal with high-end properties as that’s where most of the quality stuff happens.

Developers

Architects

Agencies

Stats Websites

You can use the site TerceroB to find out stats about properties.

If you have any more positive experiences with developers and agencies let me know and I’ll include them in the list.

How to Warm Up Before a Padel Match

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An essential part of every padel match is the warm-up phase. You should arrive at the venue around 30 minutes before your match and warm up before you enter the court to play.

The five minute warm up we see during World Padel Tour matches can be misleading. The players aren’t actually warming up during those 5 minutes. They are not even sizing out their opponents. The only purpose is to get used to the bounce of the court and the general atmosphere of the venue. The actual warm up for these professional players would have started around an hour before the match in another court.

Injury prevention is as important to the pros as it is to amateurs, and that means that we all need to warm up properly before our matches.

Warming up serves two primary purposes:

  • Lets us perform at our max right from the start of the match.
  • Helps prevent injuries due to muscles and joints not being warmed up.

A mistake that many players do is to stretch before a match. This doesn’t help and can even hamper your performance. Here I am referring to static stretching specifically. When you perform static stretching, it goes against what you will be doing in the match itself. You are stretching specific muscles, while in the match those muscles need to be contracting.

What we want to be doing is warming up those muscles and move them through the movements we will be doing in the match. Once the match is over, our muscles will be all tightened up, and that is the correct time to perform static stretching to return the muscles to their natural relaxed state.

The pre-match warm up doesn’t need to be done in a padel court, so there aren’t really any excuses.

You should maintain your activity intensity at around 10-20% of the match intensity.

I usually do around 20 minutes of warm up in summer and 30 minutes in winter, because Barcelona can be quite chilly in winter, and it takes more time to warm up the body.

Here’s a typical warm up routine that I follow:

  1. Jogging for 5 minutes.
  2. Different kinds of movements that mimic the ones used in padel, for another 5 minutes. Typical movements would be lateral runs, backward runs, crossovers, knee ups, butt kicks etc.
  3. One minute of short sprints, change of directions and virtual padel shots.
  4. Five minutes of dynamic stretching.
  5. Five minutes of rallying in the court or outside volleying with my partner.

As mentioned earlier, remember to do some static stretching after the match. This will keep your muscles in good shape and aid recovery.

Here’s a static stretching cheat sheet for padel:

What are your favorite tips for warming up and cooling down for padel?

Investing in Buy-to-Sell Spanish Property Through Privalore – A Case Study

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Over the past two years, I’ve been trying out the Privalore platform in Spain for investing in Spanish property. Two properties that I’ve invested in have already been sold, so it’s a good time to take a look at the performance of these properties and my evaluation of Privalore.

I like Privalore because they invest their own money in every property and execute quality refurbishments. The value created is very obvious and tangible, and therefore the resale price depends much less on speculation and more on the value added by Privalore’s refurbishments.

Privalore makes sure that all the materials used are friendly to the flat’s inhabitants. You can read more about this topic on FriendlyMaterials.com, which is a site of a company based in Spain that focuses on non-toxic building materials. It’s not necessarily the company that Privalore uses, but gives you an idea why it’s important to use non-toxic materials in these kinds of refurbishments.

I’ve discussed Privalore and other Spanish real estate crowdfunding websites in a separate post, but I’ll remind you once again about the commissions that Privalore takes from each project sale.

They take two types of commissions.

The first one is a project management commission:

  • around 4% of the selling price for management of the project (management commission)
  • 50% of profits until 15% return is achieved for the investor, 70% on the remaining profits (success commission)

The second is an investment commission:

  • prefinancing commission (variable rate)
  • percentage of profits based on the amount they invest in each project

These are some of the wellness elements that Privalore includes in each refurbishment:

  • Low laminated parquet in VOC’s.
  • Circadian lighting system.
  • Smart thermostat with air conditioning ducts.
  • Antimicrobial paint and odors on the ceiling, kitchens, and bathrooms.
  • Conservation of original elements: walls with reclaimed exposed brick and mosaic floors.
  • Ecological decorative paintings.
  • Antimicrobial countertop in kitchen.
  • High-efficiency air filter.
  • Reform with a neutral carbon footprint.

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Jean Galea

Online Entrepreneur. Global Citizen. Padel Player.
Founder of WP Mayor & WP RSS Aggregator.

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