Office Yoga – Practice Yoga in Your Office

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Office Yoga can improve health and productivity. Constant sitting is not healthy for your circulation or for the skeletal structure. Most of us know that excessive sitting can cause poor circulation in the legs and blood clotting.

Yet, many people do not realize excessive sitting can cause piriformis muscle syndrome (a leading cause of sciatica). Some common long-term problems from sitting too much are neck pain, shoulder pain, and chronic joint pain.

Most office workers feel spinal pain in the back, or neck, as a result of prolonged work at computer stations. This can result in absenteeism, as office help takes time to do anything else, but sitting.

If you look around the average office, it is not hard to find signs of over-stretched and weak back muscles from leaning forward. This also results in posture problems we refer to as dowager’s hump, the upper thoracic hump, hunch back (kyphosis), and forward head (hyperkyphotic) posture.

Only a few decades ago, these spinal problems were not so commonly seen among younger office workers, because children had more active physical lives. These days, it is not uncommon for a child to come home and do his or her homework on a laptop or PC.

With nearly two decades of an inactive lifestyle, and poor posture, young adults enter the work force to continue unhealthy diet and posture, which will go unnoticed until they experience chronic pain. The solution is to develop office Yoga programs during the course of a day.

The quickest, and least expensive way, to make this change is to bring in qualified Yoga instructors, who can assess daily posture problems and make recommendations for viable solutions. The primary concern here is proper posture and physical activity.

The choices are simple: Compare the cost of higher health insurance, absenteeism, workers’ compensation, and temporary disability, to the cost of an independent contractor. Whether a company is large, or small, the advice a competent Yoga teacher will deliver is cost effective solutions for long-term health.

Alternative solutions are the difference between a company’s economic survival and going out of business. With rising energy costs, companies are forced to think “outside the box.” How many commercial building owners knew or cared about solar shingles, just a few years ago?

The rising cost of labor is much more than an hourly wage. If companies truly see their employees as an asset, office Yoga can raise the level of morale and create a healthier work force. It is up to employers to find less expensive solutions to existing problems or suffer the consequences.