Seated Stretch Break

(gentle upbeat music) This mid-day routine is meant to give your tired neck and shoulders a break, especially if you've been stuck in front of a computer for awhile. This sequence re-balances the muscles to help improve your posture. Body check-in. Make sure you're sitting comfortably in a chair. And as you're sitting, you can rest your hands either in your lap or with your arms on the armrests. We're taking a moment here to see how you feel before we start this whole routine. We want to have a baseline; how you feel before the exercises so that when we check in afterwards, we can see what's changed. When you're ready, we'll begin a body check-in. Starting at your feet, scan through the legs, the pelvis, arms, shoulders, neck, and finally your head. Not judging anything that you're feeling, just making note of how you feel now so that after we do all these exercises, you can check back in and see what has changed. Seated deep breathing. We're going to start to breathe a little more deeply into the body now. Let's start to use the diaphragm, which is a muscle right around the bottom of your ribs. You want to start to feel that when you breathe in, there's some expansion into the ribs as you feel the muscle move. When you breathe out, the muscle just goes back into place. So try that a few times where you're just focusing on breathing into the ribs and letting the muscle expand, letting your ribs expand, and you'll feel your belly fill up with air as well. And then when you're doing the exhale part, you don't need to use any force; you don't need to breathe out extra hard. It's almost like you just relax and the air then comes out of your body. And it's up to you, if you prefer to breathe in through your nose or through your mouth, whatever's more comfortable for you; both are totally fine. You can also move your hands a little if you need to so that you can really sense where that diaphragm muscle is and how you feel it expand into your hands while you're breathing. We want to try to learn how to use this part of your body for breathing, not only to tap into more of that relaxing part of the nervous system, but also to get as much oxygen as possible into your body as we start to do some of the exercises that we're doing in this routine. Upper body stretches. Start by bringing your head over to the right so that we get a stretch through the left side of your neck. If you want a little bit extra, you can put your hand on the side of your head, but really just let the weight of your hand rest on your head rather than pulling or yanking on your neck, We want to just give a gentle stretch to the...