• Health & Wellness

    Mayo Clinic Minute: 5 exercises you can do without leaving your desk

It's important to incorporate movement into your day as much as possible. But that can be difficult if you're stuck at a desk and don't have much time to exercise. In this Mayo Clinic Minute, Dani P. Johnson, a wellness physical therapist with the Mayo Clinic Healthy Living Program, reviews a set of exercises developed by Mayo Clinic for people who spend hours working from a desk.

Watch: The Mayo Clinic Minute

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Mayo Clinic came up with a solution that can help people squeeze in some exercise throughout their day without having to leave their desk.

"We wanted to design five really simple exercises that you can do with a desk and a chair in a very small space so that you can work movement into your day," says Johnson.

She calls them the "5 Fabulous Exercises." They are chair pushups, desk pushups, chair squats, toe raises and sidekicks. Johnson says doing this series of five exercises only takes a few minutes, and it's designed to be done periodically throughout your day.

"If you do that four or five times throughout the day, you've really gathered a great deal of resistance training and body weight exercises in a very short period of time spread out throughout your day. So it makes it a little more doable if you're not able to get to the gym," says Johnson.

Johnson says moving like this during your workday also can make you more productive.

For the safety of its patients, staff and visitors, Mayo Clinic has strict masking policies in place. Anyone shown without a mask was recorded prior to COVID-19 or recorded in an area not designated for patient care, where social distancing and other safety protocols were followed.

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