Have You Had Your (Yoga) Break Today?

“Sentenced to the Chair.” Sounds more like an archaic death sentence than the title of a Men’s Health article, but that article was the spark from some heated conversations around the watercooler during my internship at the magazine. The argument went something like this: “They make us sit for 10 hours a day, then publish an article telling us we’re going to die if we keep working like this.”

Then we’d quote facts from the article like, “In 2009, Katzmarzyk studied the lifestyle habits of more than 17,000 men and women and found that the people who sat for almost the entire day were 54 percent more likely to end up clutching their chests than those who sat for almost none of the time.”

This, of course, was a gross over-dramatization of the truth. We will not (and have not) spontaneously dropped dead of cardiac arrest. This is also not to say the Rodale (the parent company of Men’s Health) is to blame for forcing their employees to remained glued to their chairs at all times. On the contrary, a few of the senior editors there had rigged stand-up desks so that they wouldn’t have to sit the whole day.

The main thing I took away from it, however, was that I needed to not spend every single minute deskbound. I set up a schedule of water/coffee/lunch/snack/stretch breaks not more than two hours apart. It’s something I carried into my new job at Mahalo. And, much to my surprise, I was encouraged in this. My fellow writers and I have taken a Vons run (midday walks to our local grocery store), and I often find myself walking over to a coworkers desk to talk about an assignment (or life in general).

Mahalo’s yoga expert Kimberly Fowler shows you a 10-minutes yoga routine to help relieve tension in your neck.

Even if you can’t invest in a stand-up desk, you can still “take a stand,” so to speak. Get up and get moving! Take breaks from staring at a computer screen for a brief stretch break. For some stretching ideas, start with Mahalo’s “Yoga for Your Neck” series then move on to “Yoga for Your Shoulders.” Once you’ve mastered those poses, let us know what you’d like to see more of by emailing us at requests@mahalo.com.

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