Don’t let your desk job get you down. After getting a Lap Band in Salt Lake City, combat workplace fatigue as you lose weight.
When we stop and talk about the reasons for weight gain, diet and a lack of exercise often top the list. Shortly behind these two culprits is a more generalized culprit: living a sedentary lifestyle.
Living a sedentary lifestyle is not always the same thing as being a couch potato. There are a lot of people whose lives are active, just not physically. This might sound familiar to you. A long week of work topped off with overtime, an hour commute followed by running errands and helping the kids with their homework leaves little time in the day for you to concentrate on your own health.
You feel like you have been running around town all day, but that’s the problem—you haven’t been running, you’ve been driving and sitting. It is very possible that your life is in full motion while your activity level remains stagnant.
A lot has changed in the United States over the past fifty years– including how and where we work. Fifty years ago half of all American jobs required employees to be on their feet and moving around. Now, 80 percent of U.S jobs are at a desk, requiring little if any activity for 40 hours every week. A long with this surge in sedentary employment was a rise in weight gain. With one in every three Americans either overweight or obese, these statistics should make us wonder if our workplace habits are affecting us more than we want to admit.
Power through Desk Fatigue
While it isn’t healthy to blame your job for your weight gain, it is a good idea to develop strategies to overcome workplace fatigue. Sitting in a desk chair for that long is taxing on the body. Especially in the age of computers, many of us at a desk spend our days hunched over gawking at a screen and typing frantically. Unfortunately, this doesn’t always change after getting a Lap Band in Utah.
Loosening up after a long day at the office can combat fatigue and muscle tension, helping you to feel more relaxed and energetic to take on the rest of your day. Instead of sitting down on the couch to relax after work, spend twenty minutes doing these simple arm exercises. These can be done with hand weights, water bottles, soup cans and even resistance bands, or without any weights at all.
Here are a few upper body exercises that can relieve the tension in your shoulders and neck after a long day at the office:
- Shoulder Shrug: With your hands at your sides and your neck straight, slowly lift your shoulders towards your ears into a high shrug. Hold this position for three seconds before releasing and then repeat.
- Upright Row: Standing straight with both hands at your side, bend your elbows and gradually pull both arms upwards until your elbows are even with your shoulders, or as high as you can reach. Hold the pose for three seconds before slowly returning your hands to your waist and then repeat.
- Shoulder Abduction: With your hands at your sides and your elbows slightly bent, keep your arms straight and slowly raise your arms outwards like a bird would raise its wings. Extend your arms as far as you can reach them, or until they are even with your shoulders. Hold the pose for three seconds and then release your hands back down to your sides and repeat.
Set a timer for twenty minutes when you get home from work and rotate through these three exercises, doing as many repetitions of each that you can handle. Don’t push yourself too quickly. If you aren’t yet up to the task of lifting a hand weight, then make a fist and continue doing the routines without any props.
These exercises target your shoulders and neck, so doing them every day when you get home can relieve a lot of the tension that you are holding from work, and they can help you reach your activity goal for the day!