Turning sitting into a non-stop workout

Welcome to Turning sitting into a non-stop workout. I have created this course using my knowledge and experience as a medical doctor, health coach and power & hatha yoga instructor to show you how you can use sitting in an empowering way to strengthen your deep core muscles (deep back, abdominal and pelvic floor muscles) and consequently speed up your metabolism and at the same time prevent degenerative changes to you spine (such as disc herniations, osteoporosis, age-related shrinkage).

In today´s society we spend a lot of time sitting: for work, while studying or for fun (TV, social media, computer games). Even one daily hour of sports will never fully balance out 8 or more hours of unhealthy sitting which adversely affects our spine and weakens our deep core muscles. When I look around, I see most people sitting in an unhealthy way. Even sports people and yoga practitioners adopt an unhealthy posture while sitting. Too many people nowadays complain about back pain (around 10% of the population suffers from back pain) and attribute it to long hours of sitting. However, it is not sitting itself that hurts our back, it is sitting in an unhealthy and disempowering way. Stress and work overload typically lead to tense neck muscles thus increasing the negative impact of prolonged sitting.

This course will teach you how to turn sitting into a pleasant and empowering experience for your back. Step by step, in just short 5-minute lessons, you will learn the back-friendly principles of how to adopt and keep a healthy posture. This course encourages you to take these techniques to your everyday life and keep a back-friendly posture all the time, while working in front of the computer screen, studying, watching TV, scrolling through social media, playing computer games, while driving etc. The constant activation of deep core muscles during these sedentary activities naturally increases your metabolic rate and speeds up your metabolism. As you build up more deep core muscle mass through regular practice of these techniques, your metabolism will speed up even more.

Although each lesson only takes 5 minutes a day, the objective is to apply the techniques you learn in each lesson non-stop. Awareness of how you sit and the posture you keep in everyday life and persistence over time are necessary to see the desired results.

The healthy sitting itself activates not only the deep back muscles but the pelvic floor and deep abdominal muscles as well. However, you will learn some very easy techniques of how to specifically exercise pelvic floor and deep abdominal muscles while sitting.

The healthy breathing technique which we will learn in the course will help you diminish the negative impact of stress on your body posture and your neck muscles. Moreover, stress makes us forget about the healthy posture and increases cortisol levels which slow down the metabolism. Healthy breathing is a powerful tool to bring us back to the present, keep awareness of our body posture and reduce cortisol levels.

This course is also suitable to prevent degenerative changes to the spine, such as disc herniation, osteoporosis and age-related shrinking of the body height. Even though the quality of the small bones in our spine and of the discs in between them declines with age, strong deep core muscles create a protective corset around the spine and can prevent disc herniation, osteoporotic fractures and loss of height - all three are generally attributed to aging only, not considering that the main cause - rather than aging - are way too many years of unhealthy posture with weak deep core muscles.

If you have already noticed that your height is decreasing and you are telling yourself that you are just getting old, think of how many years you have spent sitting in an unhealthy way and without training your deep core muscles. Once you start to use the techniques and exercises from this course, you will notice that your body height will go up again. In case you have already suffered from a disc herniation, this course is well-suited for you as well. If you are experiencing an acute disc herniation right now, wait with starting this course till you are able to sit and are free from strong painkillers and muscle relaxing medication. If you have already been diagnosed with osteoporosis in the your spine, you can participate in the course but skip postures which include bending of the thoracic spine (Cobra pose, High Mountain pose with thoracic back bend).

You don´t need to practice yoga or know the Sun Salutation sequence, since the course teaches chair-adapted versions of the corresponding poses. If you practice yoga and the Sun Salutation, this course will show you how to practice it in a healthy, back-friendly way with an additional whole-body, deep-core muscle activation via “grounding” through hands and feet.

Ready to harness all the benefits of healthy sitting?

Let’s do it! Let’s turn sitting into a non-stop workout!