Your kitchen as a gym

Everyday activities are an opportunity to use our bodies well or badly. Here’s some postural advice we can apply to them.

The five-minute video I’ll give you a link to focuses on cooking, but it’s just as relevant for gardening, shopping, cleaning and tidying, feeding the dog, or standing in a queue. They’re all snippets of life, but there’s a difference between doing them in a way that benefits us vs bringing about unnecessary wear and tear.

The link is to posture teacher Esther Gokhale who refers to these everyday movement opportunities as ‘downtime training’.

She’s a keen cook so we see examples of the way that stirring a pot or stacking a dishwasher calls for good posture, including a straight back and an active core. Even if cooking doesn’t inspire you to samba around the kitchen the way it does for her.

Sadly, we’re mostly not taught how to use our bodies well when we’re young, so we often have to learn the hard way when we’re older. Given most bodies have had their share of injuries by now, it makes sense to do the best job we can from here on.

Esther uses some language which mightn’t be totally clear, so here are some brief translations.

She talks about her legs being externally rotated and her pelvis settled. This means her legs have a small amount of turn-out, and her feet are wide enough apart that there’s room for her pelvis to sit comfortably between them. This might be most clear when we see her colleague Julie unpacking the dishwasher.

She also mentions using her ‘rib anchor’ and ‘inner corset’ (although the captioning says ‘core set’) when she reaches up.

Many of us automatically lift our chests and arch our backs when we reach up, but this compresses some of our vertebrae. Applying a rib anchor means drawing our ribs back towards the spine to hold the back tall and straight.

Using the inner corset refers to activating the core muscles.

And hip hinging means bending forwards at the hips with a straight back.

Here she is. Happy cooking.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tMPxmaDN3G0

A bonus. Here’s a link to Julie (of the dishwasher) doing even more everyday hip hinging.

https://www.instagram.com/reels/DHGvDTNPy2D/

Photo Source: Esther’s Instagram page