Learn the top 3 exercises with Indian clubs to counteract sitting, and put them to use today!
We all know the problem with sitting all day, and it affect us all to some degree. In the last 10 years, it’s been common knowledge that sitting six hours or more each day will slowly ruin your health and mood.
Spending most of your day seated, looking at a screen results in:
- Hunched over posture
- Neck and shoulder pain
- Reduced mobility
- Poor breathing
- Poor circulation
- Loss of muscle tone
- And even nastier stuff like metabolic syndrome
The solution
Taking short breaks to walk around the office is a simple and positive action.
An even better one is to put in a short 2 minute physical training break for every 45-60 minutes of sitting.
Sure, you could do a few burpees or any type of classical exercise, but if you really want to get the most effect for you effort, the exercises you select should do several things at once, like reducing neck and shoulder pain, or improving posture, and get you moving in 3 planes of motion.
This is where our top 3 Indian club exercises come in
- Train anywhere
- No need to take on gym clothes
- No need to warm up
- Easy to learn exercises, and possibility to make them more complex
- Elevates heart rate
- Provides gentle traction, increasing lubrication in the joints
- Whole body in motion
- Better mobility and coordination
Due to centrifugal forces of the circular swings, and the level arm provided by the club, a relatively light weight provides sufficient resistance.
With the pahlavandle you can easily change weight and bottle size to create a whole selection of Indian clubs up to 3kg each, or increase the lever arm with stacking up to 3 handles.
Doing exercises with Indian clubs forces you to stand more upright. The immediate benefits remove pressure from your internal organs, allow you to breathe deeper, and relieve stress from the shoulder and neck muscles.
Posture and emotions
Did you know that good posture sends positive body language signals to other people but also to yourself? Would you rather be stuck in a positive or negative feedback loop?
Here are the conclusion of a randomized trial on posture.
Results: Upright participants reported higher self-esteem, more arousal, better mood, and lower fear, compared to slumped participants. Linguistic analysis showed slumped participants used more negative emotion words, first-person singular pronouns, affective process words, sadness words, and fewer positive emotion words and total words during the speech. Upright participants had higher pulse pressure during and after the stressor.
Countering sitting will not only make you look better, it will trick your brain into a better mood.
What are our top 3 exercises?
We selected the 3 following exercises to help you counteract the effects of sitting all day.
10 repetitions of each move takes under 2 minutes.
- Alt. Pendulum (optional: split stance + heel lift)
- Lunge swipe with arm extension (optional: traveling lunge)
- Outer heart shapes (optional: overhead squat)
Why those 3?
Our top 3 exercises with Indian clubs are relatively fast and easy to learn, and target multiple joints and movement patterns.
The alternating pendulum will get your whole body rotating from side to side, loosening your spine neck and shoulders.
The advanced variation adds a pump to the calves, enhancing blood circulation, and challenges your balance and stability with the split stance position.
The lunge swipe gets your legs and hips working, lengthening your hip flexors at the same time. Catching the clubs behind the back with elbows up forces you to extend through your spine.
The advanced variation provides more challenge for the legs and hips, coordination and dynamic balance.
The double outer heart shaped swing is great at opening the chest, and takes the shoulders in their full range of motion in a gentle and rhythmic fashion. It also has an positive and calming effect on your nervous system related to your arms crossing the midline of the body.
Learn this signature movement of Indian clubs step by step here.
The advanced variation of exercise #3 involves your legs, and again coordination and dynamic balance. Only attempt if you have healthy knees. This blog post has some strategies to help, if you don’t.
What about core training?
It is impossible to smoothly control objects at arms length without engaging the midsection at the same time. While those club swinging exercises won’t give you 6 pack, they go a long way to help with posture and reinforcing core stability.
With 3 exercises, you basically activate the whole body in a way that is perfect to counterbalance to the ills of sitting still for long periods of time.
Bonus exercise
This exercise is fantastic for people typing on a keyboard all day. It is a bit more challenging to learn and execute, but I advise you to really give it a try though.
If you’re using our Pahlavandle, switch to a smaller bottle/ lighter weight in the learning stages of this exercise.
Once you are comfortable doing wrist circles, you can even add them to 3 exercises above.
Are you keen to introduce club swinging to your colleagues at work, and save them from a flat butt or worse?
We offer online certification and special packages where you can save 30% on the price of Pahlavandle!