10 minute kitchen workout

I created this workout to help patients fit in their strength training around their busy lives, and the feedback has been great.

Working from home is here to stay for a bit longer, and for many it may become an established way of working.

I know how hard it can be to motivate yourself to move when you are at home, with no allocated time slot, no personal trainer and no idea where to start.

So, here is the solution. You have 10 minutes, right?

I have come up with a simple movement routine that you can do in your kitchen, takes only 10 minutes, no gym kit or change of clothes needed, and you can modify to your own fitness levels. You can even do it between work emails, taking calls, running the bath or whilst watching a film.

Osteopathic care is focused on creating an environment that supports total health for our patients, and our approach reaches far beyond fixing a bad back.

The benefits of regularly using weights and raising your heart rate are significant and must become a regular practice, especially as we get older.

The benefits include:

• Reducing pain levels

• Improved mobility and strength, and less chance of injury

• Slowing the aging process at a cellular level

• Increasing the growth of brain cells

• Prevention of Diabetes Type 2

• Losing the dangerous, internal visceral fat

• Increasing mitochondria which improves your metabolism and energy

• Reduces inflammation

• Improves respiration, circulation and heart health

Life is now full of conveniences; from the chair we sit in and the car we drive, to online shopping and ready meals. We barely need to even move our arm to brush our teeth.

It’s all designed to make life easier, to prop us up, make us more comfortable, provide us with time saving hacks and make us more efficient.

Efficient at working at speed and from the luxury of a fully adjustable ‘orthopaedic’ chair, yes, but at what cost to our health?

All these conveniences are turning our bodies to mush. A chair is simply an orthotic, a brace or support to hold our ever-weakening bodies upright in the ‘perfect posture’.

The risks of a sedentary lifestyle are so well documented now. This movement-medicine will wake up your sleepy backside, open your creaky hips, stretch out your exhausted shoulders and lift your ten ton head.

All you need to do is pop on your trainers, or better still do it in bare feet.

You can even adapt it for the office, just use your chair for balance and a box of files to deadlift. There really is no excuse!

The 10 minute kitchen workout is available to download as an exercise sheet or watch as a video on our website. Or you can email us for a copy.

Make yourself accountable to a partner, friend, or me! Take a picture, tag us and post it to Instagram @stockbridgeosteopathy or Facebook @stockbridgeosteopathicpractice. I’d love to see how you are getting on!

Have fun, enjoy the process of creating good movement habits, and feeling the health benefits along the way.