If You Sit 8 Hours a Day, Do This Before Bed

Undo the damage of sitting:

Time to hit “reset”

Passive stretching doesn’t work for this purpose because holding static positions after a full day of sitting doesn’t retrain your nervous system, so your body stays locked in the same trying-to-be-protective patterns.

Thus, what’s actually needed is to move through tension dynamically to give your nervous system new information instead of waiting for muscles to relax.

Step by step:

1. Ground decompression: move into child’s pose with lateral reaches to create space through your rib cage, your spine, and your hips while breathing calmly.
2. Spinal wave movement: transition slowly from cat cow into downward dog to restore segment-by-segment spinal motion and improve overall spinal health.
3. Hip and low-back release: lie on your back and circle your knees gently to let your hips move freely while your lower back relaxes into the floor.
4. Slow flow hip control: circle your hips in quadruped to relearn independent hip movement instead of moving your spine and hips as one unit.
5. Dynamic hip flexor opening: rock forwards, backwards, and side to side in a low lunge to teach your hip flexors to lengthen and shorten actively.
6. Active pigeon movement: lean and shift through pigeon to release hip tension using motion rather than static pressure.
7. Rotational hip recovery: transition smoothly through 90-90 positions to restore internal and external hip rotation lost from prolonged sitting.
8. Posterior chain integration: bridge gently from a supine pigeon position to connect release through your hips, your glutes, and your spine.
9. Nervous system downregulation: rock slowly in happy baby to signal safety, reduce residual tension, and prepare your body for sleep.

For more on all of thus plus some visual demonstrations that are quicker and more effective than explaining some of the poses in words alone, enjoy:

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Want to learn more?

You might also like:

Stand Up For Your Health (Or Don’t) ← our main feature on this also includes more things you can do if you must sit, to make sitting less bad!

Take care!