The side effects of your highly productive screen time
Sitting in front of a computer for a long time every day can significantly affect your body, especially nowadays so many of us working from home. Whether you’re propped up at a kitchen table or another temporary workstation, you may not have the same supportive setup that you would in an office. While all that excess typing and minimal moving may be good for your career, it’s not all that great for your body. This lack of variation, along with hunching the shoulders and an uncomfortable chair, can cause back pain, headaches, tension, and tightness in your back, neck, and shoulders.
The domino effect: hips, pelvis and back
Sitting for a long time also shortens your hip flexors and prevents activation of the glutes. When this happens, your pelvis can’t rotate forward, causing compression in the lower back which can lead to back pain. Over time, if it goes unchecked, this can lead to chronic pain. After all, everything is connected. If hips or glutes aren’t working properly, it can increase impact force all the way to the knees and ankles. What’s more, your overall workplace wellbeing suffers as a result as you feel more tired.
Preventing injuries by stretching more
The good news is, it doesn’t have to be this way. Try to add some stretches throughout the day and in your spare time to help ease the strain. Frequent stretching keeps a proper blood and nutrient supply to the working muscles and tissues throughout the workday. There are simple stretches for office workers you can do that can help you prevent fatigue and discomfort. They reduce the risk of musculoskeletal injuries while reducing stress and increasing energy.
As an office worker who is sat for the majority of the day, stretching can do wonders for you! It can improve your posture by allowing muscle tissues to realign, thus reducing effort to achieve and maintain good posture. Often these muscles have adapted poorly to effects of gravity and poor postural habits. No wonder, you might feel tired and less focussed and productive at work.
Improve your wellbeing at work
Workplace Wellbeing relates to all aspects of working life, from the quality and safety of the physical environment, to how workers feel about their work, their working environment, the climate at work and work organisation.
When you’re doing long hours at work, your workplace wellbeing can easily get out of balance, and you might start feeling the burnout quite quickly. To avoid this, we recommend practicing good all-round self-care. Prevention is better than cure when it comes to maintaining wellbeing at work. Here is what you can do
- Take regular breaks from your tasks at work as well as yours creen
- Communicate with your team when you’re getting stressed
- Maintain a good work/life balance
- Practice mindfulness and meditation
- Exercise more – combine energising cardio exercises with slow-pace healing movements such as stretching
Stretching can improve your productivity
When you’re busy with your demanding job, you might feel like working without breaks to achieve the results that will help you climb the career ladder.It might be all too tempting to skip your breaks to get more things done.
However, as you might have released, long hours without interruption doesn’t necessarily mean you’re more productive. Over time,the quality of your work decreases as you’re getting mentally and physically tired. Your shoulders and back start hurting and you’re in pain before you know it.
We’re here to tell you, however, that by applying simple stretches for office workers, you can significantly improve your wellbeing at work! You don’t need to become a yoga expert to become more flexible. All you need to do is do regular simple stretching exercises such as lower back stretches, upper back stretches, shoulder stretches to start with, so you release the stiffness caused by the long hours in front of your computer. Think about how great your posture will become, and how much your tension and stiffness will improve! As a result, you’ll be in a better mood, and more like to perform well at your job.
The long-term benefits of stretching
One of the best benefits of stretching is that it stimulates the formation of synovial fluid in the joints, which acts to make the joints easier to move, thus reducing pain and stiffness. Synovial fluid is a thick liquid located between your joints. The fluid cushions the ends of bones and reduces friction when you move your joints. Joint conditions like arthritis, gout, infections, and bleeding disorders can change how your synovial fluid looks and feels.
To prevent any of these conditions, especially the risk of developing osteoarthritis, you need to start doing regular stretching exercises. You will be doing yourself a big favour if you stretch daily (even if it’s for 5 min at a time to start with)! The domino effect applies here too, the same way it happens when you gradually develop injuries.
Overtime, regular daily stretching will help you heal those injuries and you’ll be noticing huge improvements in your physical health over time, such as reducing the risk of developing osteoarthritis, and you can develop an amazing posture to be envied for!
Stretching can be slotted into your busy day: here is how
At Good Stretch, we’ve seen the impact that adjusting to working from home has had on many people since COVID19 hit and lockdown was enforced on businesses. It’s vital to ensure you and your colleagues or employees are taking care of their health and wellbeing by taking regular breaks from their desk and finding time to stretch.
We’ve been holding corporate Zoom stretch sessions to make our sessions as accessible as possible, and also to help them beat the Zoom fatigue by participating in something light, fun and interactive. We’ve developed sessions specifically tailored to people with busy working days so you can try our fun stretching classes for officer workers in your lunch break.
If you’re interested in joining a free taster session or bringing our Good Stretch Zoom sessions to your organisation, please get in touch – team@goodstretch.uk, we’d love to help!
