Fitness Swap: Desk Chair For Stability Ball

For great health benefits, use a fitness or stability ball at your desk. This is a great idea if you spend a little or a lot of time at your desk. I am a freelance writer who is at my desk up to fourteen hours some days. My large stability ball helps me with my balance, my stability, helps strengthen my core and tone muscles while I work.

Last week I read a blog entry from a man who has used his exercise ball as a desk chair for a few years and has said goodbye to back problems which use to plague him. I also read recently about classrooms where students use a ball to sit on instead of a chair and this can help with focus. Kids get to do a bit of fidgeting to keep themselves stable on their ball and at the same time this can help your cognitive skills due to the brain stimulation required to keep you stable while you work. I'm hoping this will help my creative juices.

Sitting for prolonged periods of time can cause repetitive stress injury and stiffness. By swapping out my ball for a few hours a day I help with muscle tone and core strengthening exercises. Sometimes I even bring my stationary bike over to my desk and prop my keyboard up on the handlebars when I'm working on my novel.

Those who spend long periods of time at their desks can find great benefit in stretching exercises, a stability ball, using a hand weight or stress ball to stimulate hand muscles. It's still a great idea to get up every so often to stretch and help give your eyes a rest but doing whatever you can to help you do low impact exercise while you work can provide great long term health benefits.