Stuck Sitting At a Desk All Day? Do This One Stretch

By Biagio Mazza

I've mentioned in the past that there's a bunch of research to support that sitting can be as detrimental as smoking is for longterm effects of what it does to the body. So what do you do, if you have a job where you're sitting in an office or a cubicle or wherever, you're stuck sitting for a period of your day, what specific things can you do?

You want to get up and try to move every 30 minutes. But is there anything specific you can do to combat the tendency for when you start typing and you start getting into that hunch position? For starters, having a good sitting position, good desk setup is key. If you're able to have a sit to stand desk, that's even better.

If not, my favorite single exercise, if I had to pick one thing to to have everybody do, would be this exercise here...

What you're gonna do is you're going to interlock the fingers behind the back of your neck, not the head, the neck. You're going to bring the elbows in and then from that position there you're going to scoop back from your elbow.

So you are not taking your head and tilting back, you will take your elbows and arch your back.

Where you want to feel that as directly underneath where my hands are (shown in video), not into the low back. You want to feel it directly underneath where your hands are to get a stretch in that area, which gets rounded and stuck from the typical sitting-at-a-desk position.

Ten to 15 reps of those once an hour will go a long way towards fighting that feeling of being bent over and stuck in that position.