A Pain-free Workday In 3 Simple Moves

Speaker 1: (00:00)
Hi, I’m Danielle Vernon, your back PT and ergonomist. And I’m here to talk to you today about some easy exercises that you can do while you’re sitting at your desk. So some of you might say, well, I go to the gym. Why do I need to do exercises during the day? And while that’s valuable point, if you’re anything like me too often, I actually have more work. And that trumps me going to the gym. So it’s always good to know that you’re doing something during the day to help yourself. So with this in mind, there’s five key things to focus on when you’re thinking about why you’re doing these exercises and that’ll help motivate you to do them. So when we think about neutral position and a healthy body, well, first thing that comes to mind is posture really important to make sure that when we’re sitting at our desk, that we have a strong posture.

Speaker 1: (00:48)
And when we sit at the desk for long periods of time, sometimes you don’t even realize it, that you start to slump over and get those, those kind of aches and pains that come through the day with just sitting in a static position. So posture is important with these exercises. The next part is that when we’re working in front of us, we can’t help, but get tight pecs, tight chest muscles, tight neck forward, head posture. All of those things in our anterior side of our body become very tight and shortened over time. Conversely, to that, it means that all those muscles on the backside, the back of our neck our shoulder blades our posterior shoulders our upper back our lower back, those all become weak because in this cradled C shape that we’re in during the day, we forget that those muscles back there need some attention as well.

Speaker 1: (01:39)
So unless we get up and move around a lot, or we do a couple of exercises, we’re not going to get good blood flow to those muscles, fourthly breathing. When we sit in this position, your diaphragm that sits between your rib cage and your abdomen gets really compressed. And when you take a nice deep breath in, you tend to use more the accessory muscles of your shoulders. Then you do expanding that rib cage up off your diaphragm so that you get good blood flow. Next time you’re talking to somebody, see if when they take a breath in, if their shoulders go up and down, that’s a really common complimentary cause of breathing. The fourth thing to think about is your breathing. Your diaphragm helps you breathe, and it’s located between your ribs and your pelvis. So when you breathe, that diaphragm needs to be able to expand so that you get a good inflow of air rushing in, and that helps support all your oxygenation to your muscles and joints.

Speaker 1: (02:43)
So if you’re not getting good blood flow, you tend to start accessory breathing up through the shoulders. Next time you’re talking to somebody, see if when they take a breath in, you can see their shoulders move up and down as a pretty common accessory breathing pattern that people make, especially if they’re sitting at their desk for long periods of time and you tend to start bunching over like this. It’s really hard to get good blood flow through here. So in order to get a good lifting of the rib cage up off the diaphragm and get good blood flow, you want to make sure that you’re taking a break and doing some of these exercises that is going to open up your chest wall. Lastly, focused, if you’re increasing your breathing, you’re increasing the length of your anterior muscles and you’re strengthening your posterior muscles. Now we’ve got a nice elongated core that gets good blood flow, good oxygenation.

Speaker 1: (03:36)
And you going to be able to focus better because if you don’t have good blood flow, you start feeling fatigue. You start having focus issues. And if you’re not doing your work well, then you’re not going to be productive. So let’s talk about three easy things that you can do. Just sitting at your desk. There’s a lot of different stuff, and you can reach out to us at www.backbonecushion.com. If you want to know more, but for today, we’re just going to touch on three super simple things. First of all, usually get about a two foot piece of therapy band. You can get that off Amazon. You can get that from your local physical therapist or chiropractor or two feet is normally what you use. So the first one is just called external rotation. That’s where you’re keeping one elbow to your side.

Speaker 1: (04:24)
And you’re rolling the other arm away from your side in an outward motion what that’s doing is that’s pulling your shoulder blade back towards your spine, getting some active stretching here and getting some strengthening back through that shoulder blade. Next, you’re going to do some tricep work because we know when you’re here at the desk, you’re getting lots of biceps. So what we need is the backside of your arm. So just holding this band. You can easily straighten your arm and relax and straighten your arm, and relax and while you’re doing that, just focus on keeping that shoulder blade back so that you’re not doing this hunched over position. So pull the shoulder blade back. Elbow starts at 90 degrees and straighten that arm and relax and straighten, and relax so that’s your tricep. The last one is what we call a horizontal abduction or an opening of the chest with your arms straight.

Speaker 1: (05:23)
So this time you’re going to start from the middle and you’re going to pull both arms out to the side and bring it back to the middle, back up to the side. And this way you’re actually squeezing both your shoulders back in together while you’re keeping your arms straight. So you’re using the combination of all the posterior muscles on your arm, as well as the posterior muscles of your shoulder blades. And your lower back so just remember when you’re sitting at your desk going to the gym or not, sometimes you just need that intermittent blood flow to make sure that your fatigue and muscle balance stays in check to give you a nice, healthy, strong core. If you have any other questions, reach out to us at the link below I’m Danielle, your physical therapist and ergonomist have a great day.