#loveyourhealth Campaign and the 10 minute Kitchen Workout

#loveyourhealth campaign

This year International Osteopathic Awareness Week will be taking place on 15th-21st April, forming the centre point of the #LoveYourHealth awareness month.

Today’s society places ever-increasing demands on your day, from the pressure of juggling a career, household chores, and caring for loved ones, and we know that it can be difficult to find time for your own health.

It’s often only once your health begins to suffer, you feel forced to slow down and seek help.

The aim of the #LoveYourHealth campaign is to highlight that by simply taking time for yourself everyday to eat well, drink more water, sleep lots, move often, relax more and love your body, it will ultimately improve your wellbeing and reduce the risk of chronic mental and physical illness.

Osteopathic care is focused on creating an environment that supports total health for our patients, and this month we are raising awareness that our care reaches far beyond a bad back.

One of the key messages of the campaign is finding ways to add more movement in to your day.

Life is now full of conveniences, from the chair we sit in, the cars we drive, the phones and computers, escalators, lifts, trolleys, orthotics and splints, Amazon and Ocado deliveries, and now we barely need to move our arm to brush our teeth! 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 mental health and physical wellbeing?

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’

I challenge you, I implore you, I beg you to get out of your chair coffin and move.

The risks of a sedentary lifestyle are so well documented now I’m not going to list them here, but what I will do is give you a 10 minute movement routine to 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.

The 10 minute kitchen workout:

Repeat all the movements 5 times for both sides, and repeat the routine 2-3 times. Once you are confident in the movement patterns and feeling stronger, you can try the movements without a broom, sink into deeper squats and lunges, and increase your weights and repetitions.

This takes just 10 minutes, you can do it when you get in from work, whilst making tea, while the baby sleeps, whilst watching the news or listening to the radio, or over the course of a few advert breaks. You can even adapt this for the office, just use your chair for balance and a box of files to deadlift. There really is no excuse!

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!

Go to video guides on our for the full video if you would like to follow along, or go to the downloads page to print off the exercise sheet.

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

Photo credited to www.woodenearth.com