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.
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.
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)
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.
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.