All of Yoga

23. The benefits of yoga for office workers

• Yoga Hero • Episode 23

Share episode

“Sitting is the new smoking!”

Oh crikey - do we really need another thing to worry about?

The reality is for many of us: sitting is necessary. 

We need to work in order to pay bills, and work is often desk based. News-flash! Worrying about sitting will not help anyone.

However, adding some functional breathing, some de-desking movements and some midnfulness of our posture could improve both mental and physical health - a lot.

This episode is designed to give you some food for thought, some tools and some answers to ensure that you can earn your living, at your desk, whilst also feeling really, really good.

And here's your FREE desk-based yoga classes to weave into your day (you're welcome!)

Desk Yoga: One Minute Total Reset

Desk Yoga: Two Minute Refresh

Desk Yoga: Five Minute Wrist Relief


And some other things that are totally wonderful for office workers:

🌟 Evening Retreat for Office Workers
🗓️ Thursday 20th March, 6pm
👉 Book your space

--


Workplace wellness with Yoga Hero
Yoga is an incredibly effective tool for managing stress, and for keeping stress at bay. With that in mind, bringing yoga in to your workplace can be a no-brainer for helping employees and colleagues feel their best and perform at their best. 

We’ll make it really easy for you, you’ll be practicing yoga in the workplace in no time – getting ready to return to work chilled and energised for the rest of the day!
Take a look here 

--

See the shownotes here 

--

💻 Practice yoga online with Yoga Hero, just £9.99 per month here

💌 Sign up to our newsletter here (it's really good!)

🤩 Become a yoga teacher with Yoga Hero here (we're in the Top Ten in the UK! 🙌 )

Okay, hands up who's heard that phrase, sitting is the new smoking. Okay, I can't see you, but I have my hand up and I guess you do too. So, hi, my name is Holly and I'm a yoga teacher. and yes. A portion of my time is stood up teaching yoga classes, but even so, I still spend a disproportionate amount of my time sat at a desk.

And the numerous times that I have heard that phrase, I just thought, well, what are we supposed to do?

I personally cannot type on my laptop while I'm out for a walk. I can't design an Instagram post like on a treadmill, you know. But no, seriously, I can't. And yes, of course, there's standing desks, in fact, our reception desk at the Yoga Hero Studio is an adjustable height desk, so you can sit at it or you can stand at it, and yeah, and it's great, but there's a really important point here, which is that the brain uses about 20 percent of the body's available energy. So being in a position that's using lots of energy whilst your brain is also using lots of energy could very well lead to fatigue, exhaustion, even burnout.

And there's another thing that I want to add here. Which is that worrying about something, A, won't fix it, and B, will probably add to the problem. So heroes, I am here to look at why people say sitting is the new smoking, and then to look at what we can realistically and practically do about any negatives from sitting.

And in doing so, I really hope to reduce any stress caused by worrying about sitting at a desk. Okay. Let's go. 

 

The main issues that seem to come up when people have a B in their bonnet about desk based work are 

posture, 

sedentariness, like lack of movement, 

breathing function and efficiency, 

and mental health, possibly a link with depression or anxiety. 

So let's look at these one by one.

And in the interest of full disclosure, yes, things start out like very, very doom and gloom, but they do get more inspiring at the end, I promise. Desk based posture. So thinking about desk based posture, the feet are on the floor or on the base of the chair, your legs are bent, the hips are bent, for want of a better word, and the arms are reaching forwards.

There is a risk that when sitting at a desk without awareness of posture, that the head can be forwards of the spine, which makes the neck and the spine muscles work way harder than they're designed to, and then this can lead to tension. And this tension really can have far reaching consequences like tension, headaches, jaw problems. It could even manifest as a lower back pain. Then thinking about your arms reaching forwards to your mouse or your keyboard, possibly along with this forward head posture, this can start to round the upper back, again straining and tensing muscles and also decreasing the available space for your inhaling lungs to expand into.

This affects the length of each breath. And the length and the pace of each breath can have an absolutely huge, huge, huge impact on your physical and mental health. , and one day we'll break this impact down into truly digestible, practical information. But for now, trust me, I'm a yoga teacher. Slouchy desk posture will most likely negatively affect your respiration. 

And this sort of slouchy posture leads us onto the digestive system, which doesn't work too well when squished into a slouch. Again, posture and digestion could be an entire episode all on its own, but for now let's just understand that the stomach The small intestine and the large intestine need space and they need functional breathing to work as well as they can possibly work.

And so now we're starting to kind of bring things together, we're starting to go kind of full circle. If a slouchy desk posture is affecting respiration and therefore how much oxygen you can get into your cells. And this posture is affecting digestion, and so therefore how much energy you can get from the food you're eating, you can start to see, yeah, working at a desk can have a huge impact on your health and on how you feel. Hence, sitting is the new smoking. 

And finally, at least for now, being sat with their hips and the knees both bent can impact the ability for hip muscles to contract and release efficiency, potentially leading to hip tension, lower back pain, knee pain, and exacerbating all of those things that we've talked about so far. Okay, I did say it was going to be really doom and gloom.

 Let's keep going for now, but I promise. that there is light at the end of this desk based tunnel.

 Sedentariness.

 This seems to be the main thing that comes up when reading the Sitting is the new smoking articles. The lack of movement.

One of the concerns here, along with everything mentioned previously, is cardiovascular health. By sitting for long periods without moving, blood pools in the legs and it struggles to get back up to the heart. This is because there is two main mechanisms for returning blood to the heart. 

One is gravity, which is not working for us here.

And the second is the pumping of muscles, especially the calf muscles, which is why you're encouraged to wiggle your feet around on a long haul flight. This helps get the blood out of our legs and out of our feet and back to the heart. 

And this is where I think we start to have some light at the end of the tunnel. Because whilst having perfect 90 degree angles to encourage, in inverted commas, the right, posture, the right angle at your hips and your knees and your shoulders. Actually, what's probably going to be more achievable and more effective is introducing regular movement into your day as much as you can without it being another thing that you have to do or another thing that you have to worry about.

I'd really suggest taking the time now to consider realistic times in your day that you can move for even just one minute. Perhaps before you make your mid morning cuppa, perhaps you set an hourly alarm. Perhaps every time you check your emails, you move for a minute beforehand.

Start small and build gradually. And from experience, your life starts to make space for this as you experience the many benefits.

So, thinking about one minute, or two minutes around about every hour, and guess what? We have free classes for you on YouTube. 

One is one minute long. 

One is two minutes long. 

You don't need any equipment and you don't even need to get changed. The link to these classes is in the show notes.

Don't forget to subscribe. 

And then ideally, because this is a yoga podcast, thinking about adding in an hour of yoga into your week, obviously, yes, more if you can, but an hour a week is a really, really good place to start. If you're local to Leeds, take a look at our membership at Yoga Hero. There's no joining fee, there's no exit fee, and no minimum contract. So let me summarise so far. Sitting for long periods of the day is not ideal, we know that. But it has to be done, so that we can work. Sitting without break can have a negative impact on our respiratory health, cardiovascular health, and digestive health.

and our musculoskeletal system too. But rather than thinking about having to invest in a standing desk or a treadmill desk or jacking your job, we can think about weaving tiny portions of movement regularly into our day. Even one or two minutes an hour should make a difference. Phew, what a relief, hey?

 Mental health.

The link between sitting and mental health issues, including depression and anxiety, seem to relate to the combination of being in a potentially stress inducing environment and the sedentariness, the not moving. There may also be a link with screen usage and disrupted sleep, and this seems pretty feasible to me.

This is not an episode on improving your sleep. However, moving around a bit and as suggested above during your day could maybe be done with eyes closed or with your screen switched off and that would reduce screen time a bit. And ideally your weekly yoga practice will be away from a screen. And I would hazard a guess that your regular movement would improve breathing function.

Which then in turn will contribute towards improved mental health. And we will look at the mechanisms for that in an episode soon, so keep your eyes peeled. So what have we learnt so far? Small periods of regular movement can help undo the effects of desk posture and the impact that it has on our physical and mental health.

And even one hour of yoga per week will exacerbate the benefits of this regular movement. 

 And there's some benefits of yoga for office workers that we have not explicitly pulled out yet. Yes, being a yoga teacher, I am totally biased. But I also promise that I'm telling the truth. So some explicit benefits of yoga for office workers are being mindful of your desk posture while at work, de desking your body, managing stress levels, and improving functional breathing. Let's dive into these one by one.

 Being mindful of your posture while at work.

When you come to yoga, your teacher will ask you to bring your awareness to all parts of your body in all sorts of positions. For example, your head and neck when sitting on the floor. Your hands and your arms in a pose called Warrior 2, which is with the arms in a capital T shape. Your legs in a backbend. Your knees in seated meditation, and so on and so on and so on.

You are challenged and asked to be mindful of your whole body, really, in each pose. Which sounds like a lot, but there's so many benefits. One, this uses up a lot of your mental bandwidth, which will help to decrease rumination. Two, it helps to highlight areas of tension or areas that have kind of lost their responsiveness

 and three, this mindfulness continues, which might help to decrease any slouchy desk ness that we talked about earlier on.

 De desking your body. One of the more sinister things about the human body is that it will take the path of least resistance, which means that often it will follow an established habit. So if you've always slouched, you will naturally continue to slouch unless you purposefully interrupt this habit.

If you've always hunched your shoulders when worried about a deadline, you will continue to do that. However, one of the really great things about yoga, regardless of the style that you choose, is that as standard, there's a lot of de desking going on. You'll often be practicing poses that bring your arms behind you, helping to stretch out the muscles of the chest.

You'll often have poses that lift the arms above the head. Helping to open up the side body, which is crucial for helping the ribcage move as you breathe. You'll often have poses that stretch out the front of the hips, an area that can get really, really tense with sitting, and the list goes on and on.

And you can bet that this de desking will compound with your regular movement to make you feel better in so many ways.

 Managing stress levels. Soon we will have a whole episode dedicated to understand how yoga helps manage anxiety with evidence. So keep your eyes peeled for that.

 Improved functional breathing right at the start of this episode. We look to the impact of the arms constantly reaching forwards to your mouse and your keyboard, and that this can impact on the rib cage's ability to move freely with the breath. All those movements that we can do to de desk will have such positive impact on the ribcage's ability to move, taking us a step closer to functional breathing.

But, we will break down what functional breathing actually is and how, I'm not joking, it can change your life in a few episodes time. So hang fire for that. So

Hero, I really do hope that this episode has helped to remove any worry that you had about sitting at a desk. The reality is probably that you need to sit at a desk in order to make a living. However, with anything in life, there's ways to do it that are more effective and that benefit you more. To recap, we're thinking about introducing regular movement and at least a weekly yoga class that can and will improve so many aspects of your physical and mental health.

Don't forget to keep your eyes peeled for those future episodes about anxiety and about functional breathing. And do check out our YouTube, the link is in the show notes, for your one minute and two minute de desking classes to weave into your day.

Thanks so much for listening. And as always, happy practicing.