How to Exercise While Sitting

Long hours seated in a chair is bad for your health

If you sit in a chair a lot, your hips are probably quite tight. 

That means:

• Your hip flexor muscles (responsible for flexing the hip, or drawing the knees to your chest, and moving your legs front-to-back and side-to-side) become shortened.
• This causes tightness in the hips and reduced range of motion

Which eventually leads to 

• Hip pain
• Lower back pain
• Pelvic tilting
• Knee problems - because your walking and running gait gets affected, causing strain to the knees

If that prospect doesn't appeal to you, you could consider doing the following:

Begin with One Small Change, then Proceed to a More Challenging Exercise

If you're usually sitting in a chair throughout the day, I recommend one small change that you could make to start taking care of your body in a simple way. Plus, you can multitask while doing that simple, one-minute exercise!

If you find "sitting cross-legged on the floor" too easy, you're ready for a more challenging "sitting exercise" (haha). This is the installment that I promised in my previous blog post.

Stretching Your Thigh Muscles 

In this exercise, we will gently stretch the inner thigh muscles and open the hips. In doing so, we will 

• improve the blood circulation to the hips and knees, and 
• gradually increase the range of motion of the joints as the suppleness of the hip and knee joints improves

(In short, we're keeping the joints healthy.)

Because this exercise is done in a gentle manner, it means that we can do it for a longer period. When we give the muscles time to slowly stretch, they can stretch more.

It's Also Multi-Tasking Friendly

Too busy to exercise? No time to exercise?

No worries, this is yet another multi-tasking friendly exercise. You can do this while watching TV, or reading... Anytime when you can sit on the floor.

If you don't care for it, ignore the funky name. As Shakespeare wrote in Romeo and Juliet, "A rose, by any other word, would smell as sweet." So... just enjoy the "pose" (couldn't resist the pun).

Here we go... Do let me know in the comments how it goes for you.

Baddha Konasana (Bound Angle Pose, Butterfly Pose)

1. Sit with your legs straight out in front of you, ankles and knees together, and your weight equally distributed on both sitting bones and spine upright.
2. Bend your knees and bring your heels toward your pelvis.
3. Then, relax and allow your knees to drop out to the sides, pressing the soles of your feet together.
4. Bring your heels as close to your pelvis as you comfortably can, without rounding your back. 

   
   

   Sit with the soles of your feet touching and knees pointing away from each other

   
   
5. Inhale, raise your arms up from the side, bringing your upper arms next to your ears. Lengthen your spine upwards.
6. As you exhale, fold forward and allow your palms to touch the floor in front of you.
7. Inhale, lengthen your spine forward. As you exhale, relax and allow your upper body to go closer to the floor.
8. Bring your chin towards your chest and relax your neck.
9. Stay in this position for 1 to 5 minutes, as long as you feel comfortable.

   

    To deepen the stretch, bend forward and reach forward

    
10. To exit this position, look in front, point your arms forward with your upper arms next to your ears.
11. Inhale and suck in your belly to engage your abdominal muscles (this protects your back), and come up.
12. Bring your arms down, then straighten the legs out.

Benefits

• Stretches the inner thighs, groins, and knees.
• Opens up and relaxes the hip joints.
• The pressure on your abdomen area in this forward bend stimulates the abdominal organs, and helps to improve digestion.
• The forward-bending position has a calming effect.

Stay Safe 

• Never force your knees down. Instead release the heads of the thigh bones toward the floor. The knees will follow. 
• If your knees are very high or your back rounded, don’t bend forward. Just sit upright and focus on your breathing to release the tension in your hip joints. Sitting on a high support (e.g. a cushion, a thick book, or a folded blanket) will help. 
• Do not use force to bring the upper body closer to the floor. When force is used, the muscles contract instead and you risk injuring yourself. 
• Unlike what the name (“butterfly”) suggests, do not bob your knees up and down. Just keep them relaxed during the entire process.
• A more relaxing way to do this is to have your feet further away from your groin area, forming a larger angle between your upper and lower legs.

No time to take care of your health? Try this one-minute "exercise".

Want to take care of your health, but can't seem to find the time?

Your body seems to be telling you something. There's an ache in your lower back. It comes and goes. The knees feel a little stiff.

Feel like you should do something to keep fit, or stay healthy? 

Yet, there are too few hours in a day. Too many things that you want to (have to) do, that are more important, more urgent.

When you're done with everything else, you're too tired.

Too tired!

What do you do after you get home at the end of the day?

(a) Sit down to watch TV
(b) Sit down to read
(c) Sit down to surf the web/watch stuff online
(d) Sit down with the kids to go through their homework
(e) Sit down and ... (do whatever)
(f) Do something while not sitting down

My guess is, whatever you choose to do, you're probably sitting while you're doing it.

Add that to the huge chunk of time that we spend seated during the workday, that's a lot of time that we spend sitting down.

Sitting (in a chair) too much is bad for health

Prolonged sitting does the following to your hip flexors (the muscles responsible for flexing the hip or drawing the knees to your chest, and moving your legs front to back and side to side):

• Shortens the hip flexors
• Which causes tightness in the hip flexors and reduced range of motion

Tight hip flexors eventually lead to hip pain and lower back pain, pelvic tilting and even knee problems.

What if some of that time that we spend "sitting down" at home could double up as time for you to take care of your body, in a simple way?

You'll just have to make one small change.

Instead of sitting in a chair, sit on the floor. 

• Sit with your spine upright (don't round your back).
• Try to sit with your knees bent/legs crossed, if you can. If that's too difficult right now, sit with your legs stretched out in front of you.
• If you wish, sit on a low cushion/mat/rug. Don't make yourself too uncomfortable.
• You can do something else (read, watch TV, check your kid's homework) while you're sitting on the floor.

Just sit on the floor for one minute each day. 

(That's about the time taken to watch 2 TV commercials, or read one page of a book.)

After a few (probably 3 or 4) days, you will notice your body getting used to it. For example,

• You feel less uncomfortable.

• You struggle less to stay balanced.

• It gets easier to sit down and get up.

• Your bent knees don't feel so stiff or painful. Or you find that you can start to bend your knees more.

When that happens, extend the time by one more minute. Then, when your body gets used to that, add another minute.

Keep doing this every day for two weeks.

• Pay attention to how you feel immediately after every session.  
• At the end of two weeks, you would probably be able to sit on the floor for 3 to 5 minutes.

Benefits of sitting on the floor

1. Engage more muscles compared to sitting in a chair.  
2. Better blood circulation back to your heart (your heart doesn't have to work so hard to pump blood throughout the body).  
3. Strengthens the lumbar region of the body (lower back), reducing back pain and discomfort.  
4. Strengthens the core muscles. 
5. Improves the suppleness of the ankles.  
6. Stretches the hip flexors.   
7. Promotes mental calmness, soothes frazzled nerves and is said to aid one’s creative imagination 

 

Ability to sit on and rise from the floor is inversely related to mortality risk

In the 13 December 2012 issue of the European Journal of Preventive Cardiology, in a study spanning 6 years, researchers reported that subjects who scored poorly on the “SRT score” (sitting-rising score) were at risk of being 6.5 times more likely to die in the next six years.

If just sitting on the floor is too easy for you

If you find just sitting on the floor, cross-legged too easy, I'll be back soon with the next post in which I will describe a more challenging exercise.

In the meantime, just sit on the floor a little longer! :)

Reference:

de Brito, Ricardo, et al. Ability to sit and rise from the floor as a predictor of all-cause mortality,  European Journal of Preventive Cardiology, Dec 2012