Be Well: Improve Your Flexibility With These Chair Exercises

<div class="block">Gyms offer up a number of machines that can boost our workout sessions but there are also some everyday items around your house that can be just as effective. These chair exercises are aimed at improving flexibility.</div>

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We're about to work on our flexibility, our mobility all while sitting in this chair or using the chair. So, Stephanie from hot talk me through what we're going to do. OK. So first we're going to begin with some movement. We, what we try to do is connect our breath to movement whenever we're in a yoga situation, right? So today we're going to begin, I'd like you to slide your fingers over towards the edges of the knees. This is called cat cow. So we're going to inhale, pull your shoulders forward, feel the heart open and then on the exhalation, tuck the chin to the chest and roll back up and let's do that again. Inhale, lengthen forward, shoulders, back, exhale chin to chest roll up one more time like that. Inhale shoulders, back, exhale into chest roll. Uh OK. So how many of those would I want to do? You would probably do about 10. It feels really nice to get the spine rolling right, you know, so you wanna get the mobility in the spine first because a lot of us suffer from tightness in the back, especially in the low back region. So the that area is my hip. That's yes. And so as we know the hip, a lot of issues in the low back kind of stem from hip issues. Hip tightness. So what I'm gonna show you is, um, it's called figure four position. You could do this lying down, but I'm gonna show you how to do this in a chair because sometimes people can't lie on the ground and get back up so anybody can do this. So I'd like you to do is take your right knee up, interlock your fingers to the shin, bring it into the chest a little. So even right there, can you feel that in the hip and sit up tall, press firmly into the left foot? Now, see if you could cross that right ankle over your left thigh. Beautiful. Take your hands to the shin. Now let's take this into tiny little increments. Notice how you're feeling here pretty OK. Right. Relax. Now, think about first pressing into the left foot that's on the ground and that's gonna help you to lengthen your spine and pull your shoulders back. Next, you're gonna take your right toes, flex them towards the right side. And even right there as you do that, you're gonna start to feel that in the right hip, right. So now we inhale, keeping the hands there on your exhale. Think about keeping the heart open. We talk about heart a lot in yoga. So keep your heart open and length and forward, keeping the foot flag so that the weight of the torso accentuates that you just feel it opening up and lengthen it. Yeah. So now you could stay right here because this is a lot for many people for me. If you could take it to the next level, then what you would do is take the arms because again, as more weight gets added onto that workload, it becomes more challenging. And then a lot of times people's shoulders come up. So what we do here is we rotate the palms, pull back, feel the heart length. And again, keep that. And I also like, I also feel that through my back. Yes, this is great. And then I would obviously do the other side. Absolutely. And then, yeah, you walk up carefully, you grab the back of the knee to come out of it and then you take the second side.