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3 health tips to improve your health if you work in an office

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  • Business Insider UK spoke to BBC One's "Doctor in the House" Rangan Chatterjee.
  • He explained why sitting at a desk all day can be detrimental to our health. 
  • Doctor Rangan Chatterjee offered three tips on how to improve your health if you are sat behind a desk all day. 

 

Full transcript below.

Rangan Chatterjee: Many of us are spending much of our day sitting down and that can have some seriously negative health consequences.

In fact many of us think that we can go to the gym in the evening and outdo all that sitting in the day but recent studies have shown that we can’t.

Now I’m not saying that you shouldn’t go to the gym, that can be incredibly beneficial, but actually we need to find ways that we can sit down less in the day.

Now that can be incredibly hard. If you work at home at a laptop or even if you’re working in an office, it can just be very easy to sit at your desk and not get up.

So I’ve got a few strategies that you might want to adopt to help you. The first thing is you can put an alarm on your phone, use technology to help you, so every hour a little buzzer goes off that forces you and reminds you to get up.

Even just get up, go for a walk, go to the drinks fountain and actually get a drink of water. That can be incredibly useful and it’s just a simple way of actually getting up regularly.

The second tip would actually be to drink more water. Not only is that beneficial for most of us in terms of our health but actually, you end up having to get up and pee every hour so that gets you up out of your chair as well; a simple tip with two benefits.

The third tip I talk about is having a little “movement snack” in the day. I talk about these a lot, little bitesize movement snacks that you do with other people.

So if you work in an office, I have a little thing called the two-minute office workout, where you can actually do some tricep dips against your desk, some press-ups against your desk and actually do some lunges with your partner where you give a high-five on each lunge.

It only takes about a minute and it can be incredibly fun. In fact, you don’t need to stick to that. You can make it up, but the point is, if you get up and move then you feel better, you have more energy and you’re more productive at work.

It’s not as hard as you think it is. Why don’t you ask one of your work colleagues and see if they’re up for it with you.

The other tip would be to get up out of your chair at every possible opportunity. So if you have someone in your office, consider do you need to send an email to them or can you get up out of your chair and go and speak to them in person?

We’re sat all morning at our computer, we’re sat at lunchtime at our desk eating and surfing the net, and then we’re sat there in the afternoon.

A very simple thing is to go for a ten-minute walk every lunchtime. It’s not that hard and if you start doing it regularly, it very quickly becomes easier, it becomes a new habit and these new habits become your new health.

The 4 Pillar Plan by Dr. Rangan Chatterjee is out now.

Produced and filmed by Jasper Pickering. Research by Fraser Moore

 

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