The PERFECT Daily Posture Routine (UNDO SITTING!)

We’ve got a problem here.A big problem.You might want to pull up a chair for this one.What’s up, guys?Jeff Cavaliere, ATHLEANX.com.

That’s right.Take that chair out from under your ass and actually put it out in front of you.See, because it’s time to stand up.And I’m going to start here with a frightening statistic.That is, if you sit more than six hours a day uninterrupted, you are 40% more likely

to die in the next 15 years.I get it. There’s a whole bunch of reasons and factors that make that stat appear as frighteningas it is, but it is because we’re sitting now more than we ever have in our lives. So, what I want todo today is give you a game plan, a solid, easy to follow, not going to sit here and try to alteryour entire schedule each day because that’s not practical. I want to give you an easy to follow,

step by step game plan so you can start breaking up those prolonged periods of sitting and reversea lot of the damage that’s being done to your body right now. So, if you’re like me, you mightactually benefit from a wake up call in terms of how many hours a day you actually are sitting.So, check out these numbers. The average person sleeps seven and a half hours per night,which leaves just 16 and a half hours of waking time. In that time, if you’re working, let’s say,

an eight hour job and you’re at a sedentary desk job, you’re going to be sitting for a largeportion of those eight hours. Let’s say your meals, you eat them throughout the day, that’san additional hour sitting down. If you watch TV or you work at your computer at night, let’s sayseven to 11, that’s an additional four hours. And if you’re driving back and forth to work,your commute could be an hour or two additional. So if you add these all up, that doesn’t leave a

lot of time in terms of your waking hours that you’re not on your butt. And if you look at thatstatistic I opened the video with, spending more than six hours uninterrupted sitting on your buttcan lead to big problems. So as you can see, we got some big problems. So what type of problemsare we talking about here? Well, big ones, like I said. We know that sitting too much can wreakhavoc on your body, right? Sitting too much is going to lead to something called lower cross

syndrome, which is going to tighten your hip flexors and weaken your glutes, which is goingto wreak havoc even when you stand. And talking about wreaking havoc, our backs. Sitting too muchcan apply a lot of pressure on your discs in your back and create all types of adaptive muscularproblems as well. Look, if we sat in a proper position, which we don’t with a normal S-curve,we can tolerate that downward force of gravity a bit better. But you can see that we’d sit more

oftentimes like this in this exaggerated C-curve and we apply downward pressure to that, it justgets worse. But it’s when we look beyond the postural side effects that the true ramificationsof sitting down too much become apparent. Because we know that if you do sit too long during the day,you’re going to have poor circulation and blood flow. Added to the fact that you’re going to havea decrease in insulin sensitivity paired up with a decrease in one of the key fat burning mediating

hormones in your body, by the way, by up to 90 to 95%. We realize that we’re going to struggle withour weight as well. And adding more weight to the body is not going to make this issue any better.And if that’s not enough, you’re going to get older faster. That’s right. The Journal ofEpidemiology showed that even just sitting a couple hours in a day is going to make yourcells in your body age at a much faster rate. I don’t believe that for a second. Not one second.

I should probably say now, Jeff, what do I do to bulletproof my body then? How can I stop this fromhappening to me? Well, here’s where it all starts, guys. In the morning, first thing, I want you tohang around a little bit. I mean, literally hang around. You see, I’ve given this tip before in aprevious video, it’s extremely important that you try to decompress your spine, realizing how muchyou’re going to be sitting on it during the day, first thing in the morning. And the way we can do

this is with either a pull-up bar or just a simple kitchen counter corner that you can anchor yourbody in like this. In either instance, the goal here is to try to hang around for 60 seconds.And you don’t have to worry about picking your feet up off the ground. As a matter of fact,you want your toes to remain in contact with the ground to allow the pelvis to drop, to allow thatspine to decompress. If you do this right, you’ll feel the decompression level by level in your

lumbar spine. If you were to try to pick your feet up off the ground, you might actually usethe muscles in your core to hold on and prevent this from happening. You want to feel that drop.Again, 60 seconds, whether you do this hanging from a bar or whether you do this by pushing upin the kitchen counter corner. So, from here now, your entire plan can be simplified into just threesimple steps, G, B, and S. And no, Jesse, it doesn’t mean grab a bag of snacks.

What the letters actually stand for are grab, bridge, and squat. And if you combine them withjust a simple timer app on your phone, you’re never going to screw this up. The first thingyou want to do is get that timer app open and set it for 30 minutes. You don’t want to go for morethan 30 minutes sitting down. But don’t worry, I’m not going to ask you to go walk a mile every 30minutes or do something that’s going to take up five or 10 minutes of your time because it’s just

not practical. It starts with just doing the grab portion. When the 30 minute clock goes off for thefirst time, I just want you to stand up and you simply grab your butt cheeks. That’s right, justlike Jesse’s doing here. You put the heels of your hands on the top of them, the fingers running downthem, and you push forward. Now the positioning here on your butt rather than your low backensures that we’re actually getting a healthy extension of your low back because we’re

controlling the pelvis and not just pushing in the area of the lumbar spine. But what you’ll get hereis actually a reversal of a lot of the postural damage that comes from sitting, right? We’regetting extension of the hips as opposed to the flexion we get when we sit down. We’re gettingextension of the knees as opposed to the flexion of the knees and the tight hamstrings that comealong with that when we sit down. We’re getting the ability to open up the shoulders and chest

as opposed to sitting there at your desk with your rounded shoulders. We’re getting that increase inand thoracic extension as opposed to that rounded position that we get from sitting down. So,all these things get reversed quickly and we hold this position for about 15 to 20 seconds.Now, before we sit down, we do this one more time, except we do it actively and this should feelamazing. So, instead of just pushing, this time I want you to first squeeze your glutes and then

contract your shoulder blades together as you push forward. Another 30 seconds or so here will do thetrick, you can go right back to sitting down and resuming your workday until the next 30 minutetimer goes off. And this point we actually move on to the B portion of our game plan,and that is the bridge. And the bridge here is going to give us a chance to get that activecontraction of the glutes and an additional effect on the thoracic spine by reaching over towards

the opposite side. I showed you this exercise as well and showed you how important it is.But once again, this is something that can be done very quickly and easily. You get five repsto each side, you get right back in your chair. We’re talking about 15 or 20 seconds of work,but it doesn’t go unnoticed the benefits that you’re getting from simply just standing upand interrupting that sitting pattern that’s doing all the damage it’s doing to you rig