Society and the nature of our modern jobs have us sit down like never before! AND IT IS KILLING US!!

From the time we rise and shine, we sit down for breakfast, get into our cars and sit down for another 30-60min to work, where we will be sitting all day, hunched over at our computers, to get back in our car and sit again for another time period, when we finally get home and sit down for dinner, and catch up with social media on our phones or even continue with work to meet a deadline... This sounds familiar to you?

Here are a couple of exercise and stretches you can perform from home to break the seated patterns and help you feel better, adopting a better posture and maybe getting rid of some long term chronic pain you might have been dealing with.

Because the seated position is prone to activate the muscle of the front of the body what you want to do is activate the posterior chain in order to put you back into a balance posture. This simple concept is called reciprocal inhibition (see GIF Below)

if the muscles of the front the leg stretch, the muscle of the back of the leg contract, vice-versa

BEFORE WE START I WILL NEVER STRESS ENOUGH THE POWER OF BREATHING (next blog post STAY TUNE) PAY GREAT ATTENTION TO YOUR BREATHING AS YOU PERFORM THE EXERCISES BELOW

Let start with the lower spine

As the picture above shows 63% of adult will experience some sort of low back pain at some point in their life.

**3 Exercise that will release lower back stress and stretch the muscles around the lumbar spine **

1. Gluteus Bridges:

2. Posterior Pelvic Tilt:

3. Activation of transverse abdominus:

Let's get to the upper body and T-Spine

The hunched over position protrude your shoulders forward and stretch the muscles surrounding the thoracic spine and the scapula aka Shoulder blades. As we talked about in the beginning of the post whatever muscle stretch the opposite muscle contract... If my upper back muscle are stretched out all day my chest muscle will be contracted all day too.

This video below demonstrate how to mobilize the T-spine in order to break the Hunched over position, releasing the muscle of the anterior (front) chain and strengthening the muscle in the Posterior chain (Back)

Let me know if you see any improvement after performing the exercises above for 10 minutes a day.

If you have any questions please comment below

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Chris Joly Fitness

Chris Joly Certified Personal Trainer (NASM) & Functional Movement Coach (FMS Lvel 1 & 2)