Hello, and welcome to tip number two. How do you stand, sit and move. It all starts with being aware and more mindful of how we do our day to day activities. Notice when you feel your discomfort or when you feel pain can you make the link between what you were doing right before or perhaps some patterns that may have led to that discomfort or pain that you're feeling? When we can identify what those patterns are, then it's easier to start to correct them. So in a chair, for example, a lot of us spend time sitting in the day either at the computer or at our desk or in our cars or on our couch.

And we want to avoid a slumping posture which puts a lot of strain on the spine over time when the head and the shoulders and hips are not properly aligned. So this creates wear and tear on the joints. We also want to strengthen the muscles of the legs and the hip structure to support the body in the spine as well. So if you're sitting at a desk, make sure that your posture is nice and tall and that your chair and your desk are setups that are ergonomically correct. Your feet are hip distance apart, we'd like to use the ball and I'm going to show you a few different ways to use this little bender ball, our little ball that does it all throughout the men my back program. So by hugging the ball between your knees, it starts to engage your legs, maybe 20% of your max strength.

So we're not holding on for dear life. Theater on the floor, we're sitting tall, shoulders are rolled down and back in the head and neck are nice and relaxed. So if you're sitting at a computer, the chair is not too high with the shoulders or hiked up or we're sitting too low where we have to actually reach up a little bit for our keyboards. So notice how you sit I want to give an example depending on What patterns that you do every single day, I'll give an example of two different clients that we're working with right now. One who had a lot of neck problems, which was creating numbness down to his fingers. He's a radiologist, and so had repetitive movement patterns on his mouse and his computer screen all day long as he was treating patients.

So in shifting his position and his body angle, instead of being twisted all day, he was able to set up his workstation so that his body and his posture were more correctly aligned. And with the right exercises, combined with correct posture, he was able to eliminate that pain. A couple of other clients who are representatives working on the road getting in and out of the car. We'll show that example a little bit later of how to get in and out of the car more safely, so that it puts less strain on the sacred iliac joint and the lower back. So here's a little trick for sitting in your chair. If we're using the ball and you have One great, you can hug the ball between your knees and even start working your thighs, Jen little squat movements as you're going up to stand.

So maybe to begin, it's just little movements like this. Because it's really important how many times you get out of your chair in a day. If we're getting out of the chair bending over, we're putting a lot of strain on the spine. But if we learn how to use our legs correctly, and this could even be an exercise where you're doing a little squat up, keeping your ankles, your knees and your hips all aligned. Another thing that we'd love to do is you can come right up into a standing position and go back into a squat, stand up, control your movement on the way up and the way down. You're starting to strengthen the lower body like that as well.

Little squats at the office. to support your back. I use this ball on my desk chair and I placed it actually between my back and the back of the chair. Sometimes more at the lower back, sometimes more at my middle back. So you can kind of go by comfort. And then I'm at the computer so allows me to sit nice and tall, which helps also improve my breathing mechanics.

And then I have more energy at the end of the day rather than feeling completely depleted because I've had poor posture and my body was tense and strange. We'll see you in tip number three.