“3 Do-at-Your-Desk Exercises to Avoid Becoming Chair Shaped” plus 1 more

3 Do-at-Your-Desk Exercises to Avoid Becoming Chair Shaped

Posted: 16 Aug 2012 01:05 PM PDT

This guest post is by Dr. Kathryn Woodall of Indestructible Desk Jockey.

Do you spend a lot of time tickling the keyboard to crank out a blog? Then you'll want to listen to this.

When you were a child, did your mother ever say, "Keep making that face and it's gonna stay that way?" If you're anything like me, you probably just brushed her off and stuck out your tongue.

Well it turns out your mom was right—sort of.

Your body has a remarkable ability to adapt to environmental stressors. We know this from weight training. Repeat a movement often enough with a challenging weight and the body grows new muscle. It adapts in such a way that the movement becomes easier to execute.

Trainers refer to this as SAID: Specific Adaptation to Imposed Demands. But the thing most people miss, the flip-side of the SAID principle, is that same thing happens with any task we repeat over and over. Whether you want it to or not.

If you sit at a desk all day, it becomes easier and easier to stay that way. Your muscles and connective tissues adapt and the fascia becomes thick and leathery, until your body actually becomes chair-shaped. The same thing happens to your wrists when you spend a lot of time typing blog posts, texting on a mobile device, or playing video games. They adapt to that position.

The good news is, you can prevent these unwanted changes from becoming permanent by taking a couple minutes a day to perform these simple exercises.

Banish the desk jockey hunch

Very few people in our modern world are "hunch immune." Commutes, conference tables, computer stations and La-Z-Boy chairs—they're all conspiring to reshape us in their own image!

And it's a self-perpetuating cycle. The more you hunch, the more your pecs and biceps tighten up, and the more you get pulled into that hunch… And yeah, this applies even if you usually blog in one of those overstuffed coffee shop chairs.

Thankfully, you can have a straight back again. It's simply a matter of releasing tight tissues periodically throughout your day while simultaneously awaking and activating their "antagonists"—the muscles of the rear shoulder and upper back.

You'll do this by lifting your rib cage up and forward, and then extending your mid spine to the back. Check out this video of the exercise so you can see how it’s done.

Keeping your thoracic region open and well balanced is a key to improving your overall wellbeing. You'll breathe better by freeing up your lungs. You'll look better—tall and proud—and people will interact with you differently. Your body language has a profound affect on your mood, so you'll probably also notice an increase in positive feelings.

Best of all, you might find that chronic lower back and/or neck pain begins to fade away. Lack of mobility in the thoracic region can actually manifest as pain above or below those regions.

Release your shoulders

The Double Handcuff is a simple but effective release for your shoulders, and it'll go a long way towards righting that forward hunched posture so typical of folks who spend their time writing for fun or profit.

Here's how it's done:

Clasp your hands together behind your back.
Stand tall, with a neutral spine and maintain that alignment throughout.
Lift your shoulders to your ears, roll them back, and then drive your arms down towards the floor.
Hold this post for 30-40 seconds.
Check out this video demonstration of the movement.

You can practice the Double Handcuff throughout your day, and bang out a few each night to put the perfect polish on your evening.

Mobilize your wrists

This one's easy. It's pleasant. And it only takes a few minutes.

It's also the most important exercise on this list if you spend more time googling and blogging than you do standing upright.

Just make a loose fist and circle your wrists through their full range of motion. First in one direction, then the other. Smooth out those "clunks" and work through the clicks and pops—as long as it doesn't hurt. If you experience pain rather than discomfort, get yourself checked out by a competent health care practitioner.

You can see a video demonstration of the movement here, along with several other wrist releases. You'll benefit from these whether you're an accomplished typist or a thumb shuffling Blackberry belle. Just six to eight slow, smooth reps in each direction is enough to make progress. Even better if you can do them a few times during your day.

Some of these exercises will give the overworked blogger immediate relief. Others might require a bit of practice to make permanent changes to your "WordPress posture". They really do make a difference. Give them a try.

Dr. Kathryn Woodall, DC is the author of Indestructible Desk Jockey. Dr. Woodall spent 15 years in private practice helping patients rediscover and maintain vibrant and healthy lives, and she now enjoys bringing that experience to a broader audience as an author and consultant. She published her first novel last year, and, when she isn’t writing, she enjoys exploring local trails with her dog or spending time with friends and family.

Originally at: Blog Tips at ProBlogger

3 Do-at-Your-Desk Exercises to Avoid Becoming Chair Shaped

The Future of Pro Blogging: Will You Make the Cut?

Posted: 16 Aug 2012 07:09 AM PDT

This guest post is by Sunil of the Extra Money Blog.

Saturation, Panda, Penguin, Zebra and Donkey have changed the blogosphere completely from what it was. With a new blog going up every 90 seconds, what will it take to succeed as a blogger in the future?

Blogs started as personal web logs or diaries, and readers flocked to specific blogs to follow their favorite writers and topics. But with the increasing number of blogs on the same subject matter, what will differentiate your blog from another?

A blog is now very seldom used as a personal web log. Facebook and other social hubs provide an outlet for people interested in personal raving and ranting. Blogs, at least the more popular ones with mass followership, are now platforms where readers go to obtain thought leadership on a specific subject matter expertise. At least that's how I see it from my perspective influenced by my observations online.

With all of us lacking the common element of time, readers need a compelling reason to follow you as a blogger. You need to carefully think about your value proposition if you want to grow in this space beyond just having a few hundred friends and family riding on your bandwagon.

Ask any successful blogger today whether they can succeed the same amount in the same time frame as they did earlier. In most cases the answer will be no. There is no doubt a blog like Problogger.net can be successful if started today, but it will certainly take a lot more work and a lot more time to reach the same level of success. With more saturation comes an exponentially more difficult success curve. I am sure Darren will tell you the same.

The pretenders

The pretenders are people I classify as those who are not necessarily subject matter experts in the topics they blog about, but are at least somewhat interested in those topics, either because of potential profits involved or as hobbyists or aspiring students of the subject.

And while many pretenders can be dedicated students of the topics they blog about, often they lack personal, practical, first-hand experience.

Until recently, many pretenders did just fine, leveraging search engine optimization and other internet marketing strategies like aggressive link building and social media initiatives. However, recent changes in search engine algorithms such as the Google Panda and Penguin (see below) updates have changed the game significantly to favor true subject matter experts.

With the recent changes taking place, several non-SEO attributes, such as the time spent by a reader on a website, carry a lot more weight than before. Your content cohesiveness and relevancy matters more than ever before. Google has also gotten much better at identifying unnatural link building initiatives, which are more often engaged in by the pretenders (experts automatically attract links).

Several pretenders have been hurt as a result of this evolution. For example, Shamelle from Better Blogging Ways had her site completely wiped out due to "over optimization", which is a key component of the Google Penguin update. In a much broader study of over 1,000 respondents to a poll, 65% of SEOs where hurt by the Google Penguin update.

Where in the past, internet marketers were able to manage a portfolio of niche web properties that were "thin" in nature with "quality" and useful—but not expert—content, we’ve seen a big shift in the direction in which search engines are headed, whether deliberately or not. Search engines favor the true experts.

The experts

True expertise stands out loud and clear, because not only does it carry with it deep, engaging, and high-quality content, but also volume, value, and real social proof. Blog readers are a lot more sophisticated today, and are easily able to sift through the minutiae and find the blogs authored by true experts. Your readers can definitely see through the tone and voice of your writing.

It is no surprise that search engines are favoring bigger sites with thicker content when they display a search engine results page (SERP). These sites are often ones that are authored by people that have first-hand, expert experience in the subject matter; for example, the author's profession, skill, expertise, often accompanied by factual data, numbers, graphs, and charts of sorts. Now that is sexy—it’s exactly what readers want.

Take it from someone who both has a portfolio of several thin niche sites, and more recently a handful of expert authority sites: I have seen online ranking and revenues decrease for some of my thinner niche sites, while I have seen revenues from my bigger, deeper, expert-authority niche sites climb. Not long ago, I wrote about my biggest Google Adsense earnings check, worth $5,963.41. These earnings were generated by significantly larger, authority niche sites.

In another case study, I have seen my expert authority site on requirements to become a CPA pick up organic traffic a lot faster and more naturally than any other site I have established in the past.

Why? Because I am a CPA (Certified Public Accountant. I know the accounting industry inside-out, and can write straight from my knowledge base, first-hand experience, and years of expertise. The content is genuine, solid and I know that I can produce the best content on this particular topic.

Having said that, establishing such web properties takes exponentially more time and effort relative to, say, a niche site that was built and let alone for the sole purpose of generating ad revenue from Adsense.

But this is exactly what Google seems to want. It is well apparent that Google is pushing authors in the direction of establishing expert authority websites, and naturally—because of what it takes to do so—one can now effectively only manage a smaller number of web properties (as opposed to a large portfolio of thinner sites they could run in the past).

The future of professional blogging

There are still thin, niche websites that do well, but that will last only while there is little to no competition. It is my contention that a new site with even the most mediocre content on the same subject can likely knock a thin site out of the ranks if it carries more content or has a slightly better command over the subject matter.

So while there are those remote possibilities, the message is loud and clear.

If you want to be a successful blogger going forward, read the writing on the wall and focus on topics that you are a true expert in. This is clearly the direction Google is trying to push us into, and it’s obviously what today's sophisticated readers want.

With each search engine update comes an additional push in a forced direction, compelling internet marketers to adapt, which in the grand scheme of things enhances the web with bigger and better sites of higher quality, truly expert content.

And with that comes a very interesting question: can one website, blog or online business actually become the most comprehensive resource of its kind on its subject? If another player was to challenge Google with a different approach that also supported quality, but in a different way, what could that mean for the web?

Are we going to experience free market capitalism on the democratic web space soon? Let freedom ring—and let the white dove sing. Share your thoughts and opinions with me in the comments.

Sunil is the author of the Extra Money Blog, a platform that discusses expedited wealth building through multiple streams of active and passive income where you can download his free report on How to Establish a $1,000 a Month Passive Income Stream in Your Spare Time in Less Than 180 Days. He was a CPA in his previous life and has also authored the CPA Requirements portal which guides CPA candidates in passing the CPA exam and expediting their career success.

Originally at: Blog Tips at ProBlogger

The Future of Pro Blogging: Will You Make the Cut?