Home Office Stretch (for neck & back pain)

So many people working at a home office for hours and hours and hours is just causing them to have neck and lower back pain. In a second, I'm going to show you the exact stretches you can do from your home office. You only have to take off your house slippers to get rid of the pain and not to worry about it. Then you can work at your desk pain-free, maybe even start to work out again, because I know a lot of us, when we're in pain, we don't work out. And then we gain weight, we feel terrible. I'm going to show you how to reset that. So the first thing that we're going to go over is a chest wall stretch, and I want you to do it with me. And also, and just so that you don't forget this video, make sure you share it, because if you don't, it's a chance you could lose it. And then next time you want to go fix yourself, you don't have it as a reference. So what I want you to do right now, we got to stretch out our chest. The desk just brings everybody in and makes them rounded like this. You want to stretch that out. So give yourself a 90-degree angle with your arm. Make it like an L, kind of. You're going to face the wall, press yourself against the wall, then attempt to leave your forearm and your shoulder against the wall and turn your hips off the wall. This is going to extend and stretch out your pectoral muscle or your chest muscle and really relieve a lot of neck tension and pain too, as well. You're going to hold each side for 30 seconds. So do it with me. We're going to go for 30 seconds. And as you're doing this, make sure you inhale deeply and exhale deeply. All right. Now we're going to switch it up to the left side. Same thing. Arm against the wall. Face the wall. Turn your body off. And really what we're doing as you're stretching is we're getting all of this tight tissue to kind of sit back. When this chest muscle is elongated, it helps relieve all the tension in your neck because then all the muscle in your neck can finally grab. They've been hours and hours and hours just being held forward, pulling those shoulders back and getting everything back into alignment. It's really going to relieve the tension in the upper back and the neck. Next thing you have to focus on is your shoulder blades themselves. So those shoulder blades, they get rolled around your rib cage, so it just kind of moves around the rib cage. We got to get them back and then also activate the muscles in between your shoulder blades so they can hold correct posture. What we're going to do is called scapular retractions. Now, if you have stuff hanging on your walls like I do, you can either take it down or kind of move around it. So I'm going to go on the outside of this painting and squeeze my shoulder blades together and then push them apart. A couple of cues is make sure that your shoulders don't shrug up to your ears. This is not going to help you relieve neck pain. In fact, this is going to make it worse. So make sure you focus on keeping those shoulders down and squeeze the shoulder blades together like there's a pencil in between your shoulder blades, and then push them apart. We're going to do 10 reps and we're going to pause on each one. Okay, next you're going to grab a pillow and your couch. We're going to do the hip flexor lunge stretch. As you're seated in that chair, these hip flexors, these bands that go in front of your hips, get really tight and short. And imagine a band from here to here. We're supposed to be hunter-gatherers, supposed to be stretched out. Right now it's going to be really, really tight. What that does is it rotates your pelvis forward and down and creates a lot of lower back pain. So this stretch right here can get rid of a lot of that tension. You're going to adjust your pillow right in front of your couch. Now, the trick is you're going to put one toe on top of the couch and then come into a lunge like this. Then you're going to sit up straight. From here, we're going to take this pelvis and lean it forward and down while keeping our spine straight up and down. You don't want to lean back and arch your back. That could cause more of a back problem. But put your arms up, lean forward and stretch as you keep your spine perpendicular to the ground. Now, after about 30 seconds, You're going to rotate like we're, we're going to do it together over this front leg here and then rotate. As you rotate, you're going to feel your hip open up even more. All right, now do the other side. Quick and easy transition. And hopefully your knee is padded enough. Now, if your knee is not padded, what's going to happen is your nervous system is going to lock up. It's going to notice pain and it's going to lock up, just like your back tightens up when it's in pain. We want to stretch everything out. So if you don't have a pad under your knee, you're going to experience a little bit of pain in your knee. Which means it's going to lock up. You're not going to be able to stretch. It's super, super important. You want to be able to stretch when you do this. Now, it doesn't have to be a nice chinchilla pillow like I have here. It could be a different animal or a different type of decorative pillow. I recommend chinchilla. Rotate. All right, we've got one more move for you after this. We're going to do a pigeon stretch, but we're going to use this same area on the couch. You're not even going to have to take off your house slippers. You're not going to have to move a lot. You're just going to get rid of your upper back pain and your neck pain and your lower back pain. All right, now we're going to do a pigeon stretch. The key to this one is you want to set up before you get down. So what we're going to do is I'm going to put my leg here and I'm going to start this to make a 90-degree angle, lean forward here and just sit. So the other thing that happens when you sit in the chair all day is these glutes, they stop firing. They just turn off. And when the glutes are turned off, they're not holding your pelvis in alignment. They also get bound up in that hip capsule. Starts to really, really get agitated and lock up. And then you have SI joint pain. This pigeon stretch, you want to hold for like 90 seconds right here. Just sitting straight up like this is enough stretch for most people. It's, it's tough. You're going to feel a lot of stretch in your glutes. Now, if you want to take it to the next level, you would inhale deeply from your diaphragm and then exhale and fold forward. You're going to want to hold this stretch here for 90 seconds. We're going to try to go about 60 seconds and do it with you. But as you know, keeping track of 90 seconds in your head while also commentating a video is not my strong suit. I'm a really, really, really good functional fitness trainer. Not too good at counting. Go ahead and switch. Same thing. Make sure you line it up before you sit down. And again, this may be a good enough stretch for you right here. Is this— could be— this could be all you have to do. And what we're doing is we're really focusing on this hip capsule and this glute, just stretching this out. So you should feel it right here. And then again, if you feel flexible enough If this isn't a stretch for you, inhale deeply, exhale, fold forward, and you're going to hold this again for 60 to 90 seconds until that glute releases. And one of the cool things about these stretches is they're pretty much good for anybody. None of these should actually bring you pain if you're doing them incorrectly, you're doing them wrong. But I will have to admit, you do need a proper resistance training program to get rid of the pain long term. If you've been following any of ResetU videos, if you subscribe to our channel, you're going to know that this is just like a primary— or sorry, it's a fix that's not going to last forever. So what we've got to focus on is long term. What are you going to do long term? You have to hold this alignment. If not, it's kind of going to the chiropractor. You're going to go back every single week looking to get rid of your pain. If you want to get rid of it for long term, you have to do resistance training to hold all the changes we're making in your body in place. And for that, we actually have a reset challenge coming up that you'll see in a couple other videos. All right, if you haven't already done so, make sure you share this to your page so that you can see it later, and make sure you start incorporating these into your daily routine. No one wants to live with neck pain and back pain when they're trying to do some work. See ya!