Get up, stand up.

- Bob Marley

Short and sweet. Of course, if you’re not into reggae, you can go with R.E.M.’s exhortation to “stand in the place where you are,” or mimic some post-apocalyptic plague life and do The Stand.

Whatever mode of motivation you choose, try to make it a point to get up from your seat — whether it’s at your desk at the office, your computer at home, or the couch doing some console gaming or just watching TV — at least once an hour. There’s a semi-insidious bit of badness that comes from our seat-centric lifestyle: short and tight hip flexors.

Fortunately, the simple act of standing up and moving around a little will help keep them from getting too bound up, and nobody’s apt to look at you funny for doing this throughout the workday. If you need a subtle reminder, you can set your PDA or computer to pop up a note, or play a snippet of one of these songs, once an hour. To geek it up a bit and add a frission of randomness, you can roll 3d20 and do your standing at the sum of those three, so it’ll change a little bit every day.

This, however, might get you those weird looks we were talking about earlier.To do something a little more active about stretching them out, and improving your hip mobility, you’ll want to head to your usual workout nook, preferably with some soft carpet or a yoga mat if you’ve got one. There’s nothing too fancy about any of these moves, and we don’t even need to incorporate any weight.

• Your Basic Lunge: Take a relatively long stride forward, leave your rear foot down, and slowly lower your body, keeping your torso vertical. You’ll feel this stretch on the front of your back leg (and will get a little bit of strength training for the thigh and butt muscles of your front leg when you stand up). Don’t bounce, just stay down there for a slow ten count, then change legs. If you can touch your knee to the floor, that’s great, but don’t push to get there, especially at first. If you have a decent sized room, you can turn these into Walking Lunges, where you take the stride, do the stretch, and take the stride with the other leg. It’s basically like being an extra in the Ministry of Silly Walks, in slow motion.
• Lunge Variations: You can do a couple of different things to spice the basic lunge up — do it backwards (cleverly called the Reverse Lunge), or do it while keeping your arms over your head (the Overhead Lunge). The overhead one is definitely a little trickier when it comes to balance, but it also offers the best stretch, since you’re keeping your body more upright. If you find balance to be an issue, taking something like a jump rope or broomstick to hold in your hands while your arms are overhead can be really helpful.
• Overhead Squat (OHS): Just like the name suggests, instead of having one leg forward and one back, you’ll have your feet a little more than shoulder width apart, toes pointed forward or slightly outward, arms overhead, and just lower your butt as far as you can while keeping your heels on the floor. Then stand back up after holding at the bottom for a couple of seconds.

For anyone this is old hat to, you can incorporate weights — hand weights, dumbbells, or even a barbell — with all these moves. I’ll be perfectly candid here – the overhead squat is totally my nemesis, and I hate doing them… which means I need to do them to get better.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, it’s been about an hour since I began banging this out. I need to stand up and do a little stretching.

Related posts:

1. Words of +WIS: The value of achievement lies in the achieving
2. Words of +WIS: Absorb what is useful, reject what is useless.
3. Words of +WIS : Life Is Like A Mop