Suggestions to enliven your body while performing computer work.

1. Change positions in your chair often.

Every 30 minutes for 30 seconds move away from the chair and stretch the leg backward, with your toes off the ground. Grasp your ankle from the back and stretch your leg.

2. Every hour take a five-minute break for these exercises:

Wiggles and circles

• See how many ways you can wiggle and undulate your back.
• Make a few big, smooth circles with each arm, imagining that your fingertips are leading the motion.
• Rotate your arms, forearms and hands in both directions. Move your head slowly in a circle, in both directions.

Blinking

• Blinking is nature’s way of lubricating the eyes. Most computer users and people who are nearsighted do not blink frequently enough.
• While working at the computer, try to remember to blink.
• Waggle your hands at both sides of your face to stimulate peripheral vision; then keep that awareness as you work.

Palming

• Sit comfortably with elbows supported.
• Warm your hands by rubbing them together, lightly cover your eyes with them, breathe deeply and visualize blackness — an ocean at night, a black object moving on a black background, a dark cave, etc.
• This exercise rests the optic nerve and the muscles of the eye and relaxes the nervous system.

Flexible Focusing

• Walk over to the window, breathe deeply, and spend a few minutes looking into the far distance. Notice how restful it feels.
• Then let your eyes sweep back to nearby objects, then back into the distance again.

3. Lunch Time Massage

Deep tissue massage

• At lunch take a moment to stand with your back to a wall and place two used tennis balls on either side of the spine, close to but not touching the vertebrae.
• Bend your knees and move up and down the wall, pressing on the tennis balls.
• This provides deep tissue massage to release tight muscles!

4. Flex your spine morning and night.

Movements for flexible spine

• In the morning and at night,  face the wall with arms outstretched and hands against the wall, feet slightly apart.
• Move the lower back forwards and backwards, in and out. Curve your stomach inwards, curve it outwards, by stretching and arching the lower back.
• Do it back and forth, then move the middle back in the same way. (Did you know you have a middle back? Think of your rib cage and diaphragm area.)
• Then move the upper back forward and backward.
• Over time you will notice the spine becoming more flexible.

5. Prevent Carpal Tunnel

Combating and Preventing Carpal Tunnel

• Rest your right forearm on a table, and relax your right hand as completely as possible while you grasp a fingertip and passively rotate it in both directions with your other hand.
• Do each finger and thumb and then do the same with each joint on each finger.
• Now, bend your elbow and support it on the table or desk. Grasp your right hand just under the wrist with your left hand and let the right hand rotate slowly in as big a circle as you can make without tensing the arm.   Keep the right hand and fingers completely relaxed, and let the wrist do the work alone.
• Now, with your elbow bent and supported on the table, move the entire forearm in a big circle in both directions with your arm, wrist and hand relaxed. Let the fingers lead the motion. Repeat several times.
• Drop you right hand into your lap, and move your shoulder in a circle in both directions, thinking of the shoulder tip as the access of rotation. Be sure your shoulder is not hunched, but dropped.
• With the fingertips of the left hand, gently tap on your right hand, arm and shoulder. Gently massage and squeeze, too. Notice how your right hand, arm and shoulder feel. Are they lighter? Easier to move?
• Now do the same to the left hand, arm and shoulder.

These simple, everyday exercises, as well as constant kinesthetic awareness, are the keys to preventing RSIs to the body and eyes. Today’s working world demands that much of our time be spent in a stagnant position, but by raising our consciousness of the movements our body needs, we can play an active part in maintaining optimal health.

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