Wellness Tip of the Week: Quick exercises for mobility and posture

For this Wellness Tip of the Week, Aaron Shaw, OTR/L, CHT, CSCS, healthspan coach and host of the Healthspan Digest podcast, shares 2 quick exercises: one to boost mobility and activate the nervous system and another to help correct slouched posture. He also discusses the mental and emotional benefits of body movement.

Below is the video transcript, lightly edited for clarity:

Aaron Shaw, OTR/L, CHT, CSCS: Hey everyone, Aaron Shaw here with another Wellness Tip of the Week. Before you reach for caffeine and more sugar on those busy, chaotic days, try this instead: body movement. Get your body to move a little bit, and it will actually help get your mind right. Our body loves to move, and there's just a couple quick things you can do, 2 quick things you can do to help get your body focused, get your mind right, and even decrease a little bit of stress.

So it turns out that movement lowers cortisol, this is our stress hormone. What it'll also do is give you some dopamine and serotonin, which are the chemicals that'll boost our mood and improve our focus—something that we can definitely do during busy clinic days, really any day.

So here are the 2 quick things you can do, takes a minute or less. First step is do some high knees. You can be standing up in a clinic. You can be in the grocery line. You can be at home, in your home office. Think about bringing your knees up nice and high. Do about 10 or 15 times each side, nice and easy. You can do this in between documenting, in between doing things. Great for mobility, great for your nervous system—gets it activated just a little bit.

Second quick tip you can do: I think about opening a big book, nice and wide, because what we tend to do, we have this all-American slouch where we're on our computers, we're on our smartphones. We're watching Netflix, watching TV in the evening and we all tend to get hunched over, working with our clients, we're always hunched over. That can lead to a whole list of problems.

So, we want to correct that. We want to reverse that, and to reverse that, we can think about instead of being bent forward, think about sitting up tall, or standing up tall and opening up this big imaginary book, big imaginary book where you're opening [it] up cover to cover. And it gets you to squeeze your shoulder blades back a little bit, get your chest up, get your head up. Hold that for 2 or 3 seconds, bring it back down, bring it back up. You can do these anywhere. It's simple, it's quick. Two quick movements you can do that will really improve your posture, but it's really a brain exercise, a nervous system exercise and a mood enhancer in disguise and you get better posture. So it's like, win, win, win. So, give those a try, and I'll see you next week for another Tip of the Week.