5-Minute Exercises at Your Desk

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Dori Ricci, NASM, CPT
Some people have a hard time fitting exercise into their busy schedules. So I'm going to show you some exercises that you can do in your office, at your desk anytime. The first exercise is a squat… where you use your chair as a prop. And you're just going to bring your hips down to the chair. Bring your arms forward as you go down. Just touch your hips to the chair, don't put any weight on your hips. This exercise works the total body. It works the shoulders, the chest, the core muscles and the legs. And it also gets your heart rate up a little bit. The second exercise is a dip… Make sure you're using a chair without any wheels… You're going to place your hands on the handles of the chair and just lift your body weight up…and down. This works your upper-body-- the arms, the chest the shoulders, the back and the core muscles. It also gets your heart rate up. The third exercise is called a vertical crunch. You place your hands behind your head and just pull elbows down towards your knees and come back up. This works your abdominal, your lower back and your core muscles. And a variation of this exercise would be, just a twist and lift your knee, and pull the elbow towards the knee as you twist. And the last thing I'd like to suggest…is doing some stretching… because a lot of people sit at their desk all day and hunch forward… so I'd like to suggest that you do some stretches that bring your upper body in the opposite position—where you bring your elbows back. Reach up over your head and back or just place your hands on the back of your chair. This combination of exercises works your total body and gets your heart rate up a little bit. If you do each exercise for a minute a day, then that's a five-minute workout that you can do at your desk, in your office anytime. Now let's get back to work.