Seated mountain

- Hey desk yogis. Today we're going to play with a really simple posture, seated mountain pose. Very, very easy to get in to. It's a foundational pose, teaches us a lot about our posture, what we're doing with our bodies, and where we find that energetic spot in our spine sometimes. That sounded really yoga but that's what we're going to be doing today. We go ahead and come on over to our desk. Try to find the spot where our heels are directly underneath our knees here. And just find out where we're sitting nice and straight. Now what I like to do, is I like to reach forward till my shoulders start to kind of slouch forward a little bit. I want to start to slide our hands back, bringing a little bit of traction, a little bit of like effort sliding against our desk here, until our chest starts to lift. Keeping elbows down pulling the shoulders back. And then find that spot where you feel kind of nice and strong here. We don't want our chest really up high. We just want it kind of nice and open and wide. Now typically when we're at our desk all day we've been typing and we tend to do this, we tend to slouch quite a bit. Now what seated mountain does, is it brings an awareness to all the musculature of our upper back. And once we start playing with that awareness, it becomes second nature. So by sliding our hands back here, the muscles between my scapula start to pull together and that's what pushes my chest out. And then as I engage my core and kind of draw my belly in, my core, my low back, all these muscles here, my lats, start to pull everything down. The shoulders come down and back. And now I'm sitting really strong. Because the front of my body, my abs and everything, my pecs are a little bit engaged, and a lot of my upper back is engaged here. Too many times we spend our life like this and our upper back is never really engaged. By learning the simple pose here the muscles between the scapula, or rhomboids, our big muscles of our back, our lats, are drawing everything down and now we're sitting nice and strong with a lot of muscles coming into play, even though we're not even really working out. So we find that spot, we want to make sure that our shoulders aren't up really high. We bring the elbows down, shoulders back, navel comes in, and now we're in seated mountain pose. A very simple yoga pose, it kind of like is the foundation for most other postures we'd be doing. And you hold this pose here. Just get to know like how it feels in our upper back. How it feels like across our shoulders, across our chest. It's getting nice and solid. Now the more we practice this pose, it'll start to become second nature and be easier for us to hold this posture, even when we're typing and whatnot. Even when we're driving our car or pushing a shopping cart. It's just finding this position and hanging out there. Now doing it for three to five breaths, four or five times a day might sound like a lot. But it's such a simple pose, squeezing it in a few times a day is really nice. And whatever sort of breathing you want to do. Maybe you'll start to learn how to hang out in this pose while we do some typing. And then we can go ahead and relax, and come on out. For some of us when we first come into that it'll take a lot of activity to stay strong in that pose. For others it'll be like okay cool, here we are. And then we could just relax. Thanks for joining us today desk yogis. We'll see you in the next video.