Posture & Body Awareness for Office Workers

Good posture and body awareness practices can help you stay comfortable and productive at your desk job. Office work, in particular computer work, can wreak havoc on your posture and disconnect you from your body. So it’s important to cultivate awareness of your body and to stay cognizant of your posture.

The articles below will help you manage the posture and body awareness challenges of desk work.

Progressive Reengagement, Part II

August 16, 2011

Yesterday’s post reengaged our body from our feet up to our pelvis. Today, we’ll continue on up to the top of the head. Stand up and review yesterday’s progressive reengagment sequence, scanning your body for engagement at your feet, ankles, knees, hips, and pelvis. Picture your sacrum, the arrowhead-shaped bone pointing downward at the base [...]

Read the full article →

Progressive Reengagement

August 15, 2011

I warned you that this blog would include crackpot ideas. Exhibit A coming right up. Progressive relaxation is a common technique used in yoga classes and meditation practices. It’s typically a guided exercise that has you tour your body from the tips of the toes to the top of your head, progressively letting go of [...]

Read the full article →

Esther Gokhale’s Non-Exercise Approach to Posture

August 9, 2011

My pathway to the world of massage and fitness began with a bout of horrible low-back pain when I worked in book publishing. My high-stress work life, frequent travel, and clueless-20-something lifestyle culminated in a locked-up back and visits to every kind of medical and alternative healing professional you can imagine. How I wish I had [...]

Read the full article →

What Has Happened to Our Posture?

August 8, 2011

Something bad has happened to our posture over the past 150 years or so. Look at these portraits of four U.S. presidents, taken about 50 years apart: Lincoln (1860), Taft (1910), Kennedy (1960), and Obama (2010). Granted, these portraits are from different angles and were not taken with postural analysis in mind. But just looking [...]

Read the full article →

How to Retract Your Office-Posture Turtle Head

August 2, 2011

Staring into a computer screen (or a windshield or a book or a pile of spreadsheet printouts) all day can leave you looking like a turtle. Your head ends up hanging in front of your torso. Your neck is bent forward with the muscles along the back of the neck hanging on for dear life. [...]

Read the full article →

Stabilize Your Shoulders for Better Desk Posture

August 31, 2009

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how to stabilize shoulders so that they can best serve you at your desk. The rolled-forward posture that typically accompanies desk work leads to pain between the shoulder blades, sore necks, headaches, and other afflictions. Tucking your shoulders back and getting them to lie down on your torso [...]

Read the full article →

Laptop Ergonomics

March 19, 2009

Laptop computers have now replaced desktop computers as many office worker’s main computer. This presents a challenging ergonomics problem. Since the laptop keyboard, pointing device, and screen are connected as a single unit it is impossible to have both a relaxed shoulder/arm/wrist position and a level neck and head posture. If you raise the laptop [...]

Read the full article →

Active Sitting with an Exercise Ball

November 12, 2008

We are sitting more now than at any point in history. We used to work on farms and in factories. We used to hand-craft barrels or hammer out horse shoes or weave rugs. Now most of us are office workers, sitting on our keisters all day. Using “active sitting” part of each day puts your [...]

Read the full article →

Try a Stand-Up Desk at Work

November 11, 2008

“If sitting is to blame, standing is going to be the solution,” says Dr. James Levine, champion of the treadmill desk, which he has tirelessly promoted for the past several years. There is no champion for the stand-up desk as there is for the treadmill desk, so I will rise and salute this wonderful innovation. [...]

Read the full article →

Relax Back into Your Height

November 6, 2008

Today we will dance. Or at least move, doing an exercise that a dance teacher taught me years ago. This exercise is one of my favorite ways to restore my height after a long stretch sitting at the desk. Especially one of those marathon writing sessions where I’m so engrossed in my work that I [...]

Read the full article →

← Previous Entries