I’ve been there, when you’re not stressing about the work and deadlines, you might get a moment to hate the damage sitting down for hours does to your body.

Not everyone has the luxury of being able to choose a job which doesn’t require sitting for many hours during the day, but what you can choose is what you do with the other parts of your day to offset that potential damage.

At Brightonfit we harp on about ‘mobility’ and ‘flexibility’ quite a lot, but with good reason. The more time you spend sat down the more time you must make to stretch. We always carve out time in a session to focus of flexibility, but it needs homework too.

Here’s an idea which might work for some of you. Stretching at your desk might incur the occasional ‘funny look’ but I promise you, say it’s helping your back pain and no boss will want to stop you from preventing a sick day through your own diligence.

A few ideas then:
•       Glute crossover – cross your legs but hug your knee to chest with a twist towards the knee.
•       Hamstring reach – use anything under the desk to prop your straight leg on and reach forward – with your back straight – to use your keyboard
•       Hip flexor sitting – similar to the glute stretch, with heel on knee but push the knee downwards to bring the leg parallel to the floor.

However, within reason this can all be done without drawing too much attention to yourself. First thing is, as I say to all my clients, find out what works for you: what I mean here is there are tons of stretches and variations of stretches out there, best bet is to choose 3 or 4 which work (I.e. hurt like hell) and stick to them – be consistent…once a day is better than 1 solid hour a week when/if you remember to.

If Yoga and Pilates aren’t your cup of tea, that’s fine, forget thoughts of spiritual connections here and remember the reasons for bothering to do this: to become a more supple, stronger and (most importantly) less injury prone human being.