Get a workout at your desk

If you sit all day at work, you may think that means you can’t burn any calories. Sure, you might walk to lunch, take the stairs when you can, park at the far end of the lot, but does this really help? The old-school thinking was that any motion is good. We now know that its more beneficial when that motion—or even stillness—is does with the correct posture to create proper bio mechanics.

That means that sitting at your desk—with the proper posture—can burn more calories than the extra 30 steps you might take to get to the car. It all depends on whether you are doing the work or if you allow the chair to do it for you. All you have to do is follow a few simple steps to position yourself properly. It starts from the ground up:

1. Place your feet flat on the floor.
2. Make sure your feet and knees are hip-width apart.
3. Adjust your chair so your knees are at or below the level of your hips and positioned directly above your ankles.
4. Your backside can be in one of two positions. If you want your body to do more work, you should sit on the forward third of the chair seat. To allow the chair to do more work, sit as far back in the chair as you can so your backside is touching both the chair back and seat at the same time.
5. Position your shoulders directly over your hips with your ribcage up and abs back. Your shoulders should be loose, and you should use all of the muscles from mid-chest to the hips to lift your ribcage. You need to make sure you aren’t lifting yourself with the small muscles in your shoulders.
6. If you are working at a computer, position your elbows at a right angle and make sure your arms are directly under your shoulder sockets. As you type, your wrists should be straight.
7. Center your head in relation to your spine. To achieve this position, imagine you have a string coming out of the top of your head pulling it toward the ceiling. Once you have done that, maintain the position, but relax your neck and shoulders. Don’t let your shoulders move up with your head; keep them down and loose.
8. Keep your chin and your field of vision as level as possible so you aren’t continually looking either up or down. To get it right, you may need to change the position of your keyboard and monitor.

A word of caution

Now that you know how to burn calories at work, don’t just jump right in and do it all day. You need to build to that gradually.

The first step is to put a reminder in your normal field of vision—perhaps a sticky note on your monitor—that tells you to practice your posture. Start in short intervals—15 to 30 seconds, whenever you see the reminder—to begin to train your body to hold the new position. Throughout the day when you become distracted with old postures, the reminder will bring you back.

If you find that you are very sore after the first day, shorten the intervals. If you are lightly sore or not sore at all, lengthen them. Keep working at it until you find yourself looking at the reminder and realizing that you are already in the perfect posture.

Originally published in Grosse Pointe Today.