This Week’s Thrive In Five Is About Posture. We share some tips on how to recover and relieve poor posture or posture issues after a long day at work
This week, our health coach Liz Marsland is talking all about posture. In particular, she is focusing on helping you recover your posture.
We all know that when we’re working at a desk all day or using our phone, driving, cycling, even with a standing workstation, we can adopt poor posture positions. We tend to lean our head forwards or stand in slightly funny positions. So we’re looking at ways to recover and relieve poor posture or posture issues after a long day at the office or a long day at work.
Poor Posture Recovery Exercises
Whether your sit or stand for your working day we tend to allow our shoulders to come forward. This can cause a lot of stress and tension around our shoulders, and our muscles at the front get quite tight. So one easy thing that we can do, which energises as well, is twisting.
Exercise 1: Standing Twist
A standing twist or spine twist is essentially twisting from the waist. This exercise helps us to get blood through our spine. We rotate the discs in our vertebrae. We’re opening the chest, getting some fresh oxygenated blood flowing. Tuck your chin in, get in a nice position, and you should find it’s energising and also quite relaxing.
You also get to throw away some stress, and get some movement going. We’re getting that twisting in our hips as well. Sitting for prolonged periods means we can become tight through the hips as well so this should help free that up too.
So quick and simple to do and really good to relieve the body and start to energise you. You can do that for as long as you like.
Exercise 2: forward fold with clasped hands
Another great stretch for you is a forward fold with clasped hands.
Clasp your hands behind you, and open the chest. Draw those shoulders back and down. Then you lean forward from the waist, allowing the clasped hands to come overhead. If you want to take it further, and it feels comfortable to do so, you can pull them right down, take the legs wide apart and then lean forward.
You may get a few cracks in the top of your spine as those vertebrae just release a little bit and the tension releases. Do that a couple of times and don’t worry if you can’t get very far.
It’s a really great stretch to start opening our muscles in the shoulders.
Make it a movement snack
Both of these exercises could be woven into your day as part of your movement snacking. Hopefully, they help to energise and relieve any tension in your body. Give it a go and let us know how you get on!
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