Sitting Hurts — 2 Stretches to Ease Your Discomfort

If you're someone who is working in the office or working from home, but you're mainly sitting at your desk all day, this can really cause tightness in the psoas muscle. That is also known as the hip flexor, and it's really important to make sure you stretch that out.

Today, I'm going to walk you through two different stretches that help release any tension that you may have in your hip flexor from sitting all day. Watch the video below for a demonstration and read on for a description of the stretches. 

You want to make sure you guys have a flat, firm surface. I'm using my workout mat today, but you can also feel free to do this on your bed at home as well.

First, what you want to do is you want to lay flat, and then what I'm going to do is I'm going to lift my right leg and stretch out my left hip.

And so I'm going to lift up my right knee, hold my hands like this, flex my foot, and slowly bring my knee to my chest.

The way that you can tell if your hip flexor is needing stretching is that your lower leg will start to lift up as you bring up your right knee, so that can really tell you that it needs stretching. You'll feel it right here, and so what you want to do to stretch it out is the same thing.

We're going to bring your right knee up, make sure your foot is flexed, have your hands clasped like this, bring it to your knee, make sure you breathe in through your nose, out through your mouth, and slowly pull it towards your chest, feeling the stretch right along here.

You want to hold this for about 20 seconds, and you don't want it to be too painful that it's unbearable, but you want it to kind of feel like it hurts, but it hurts so good, right?

You want it to feel that like good stretching, but nothing that's too uncomfortable or a sensation that's too unbearable. You want to repeat that three times on the same side and then you also switch to your left leg, bring your left knee up to your chest, breathe in through your nose, out through your mouth, do it slowly, and then also do that three times through, so three sets of that.

The second exercise is you want to make sure that you have, if you don't have a workout mat or you maybe need an extra cushion, you can always grab a pillow or a cushion if you have sore knees.

I'm going to use my right leg first, bring that forward, and I want to have a 90-degree angle on both legs, so a 90-degree angle here, as well as a 90-degree angle down there.

So what I'm going to do is, if you are somewhere where you can balance on either a side table or a coffee table, feel free to do that, I'm going to hold onto my wall right here. You can also feel free to put your hand on your hip.

And you're going to slowly lean forward, feeling that stretch in the left hip and like always, breathing in through your nose, out through the mouth. Hold for 20 seconds. And like I said before, you want this to feel like a good stretch, but nothing that is too uncomfortable or doesn't feel right.

You'll bring this back and then you can switch to the other side. You also want to do the same thing on this side, so a 90-degree angle here as well as a 90-degree angle there.

Hold on to the wall or any surface as you need, feel free to put your hand on your hip, and you're going to slowly lean forward. I forgot to mention this before, but make sure your knee's in line with your ankle as well.

That's also important to take note of, so slightly lean forward, feeling that stretch right here. Breathing in through the nose, out through the mouth. And slowly come back. And so, then you would repeat that for three sets on each side.