Stand & Stretch — undo the desk hunch

Stand & Stretch

Undo the desk hunch — two minutes of rolling your shoulders wakes your whole body up. The steps advance when you tap, not when a timer says so: your body sets the pace, which is the entire relationship with exercise this app wants to have.

In the app

Four steps, each lasting exactly as long as you leave it:

1. Reach up — both arms, a good long yawn of a stretch
2. Hold it — stay up, breathe
3. Soften down — fold back to neutral without dropping
4. Rest — stand there a moment, being a person who just stretched

When to reach for it

• The 3 p.m. slump that coffee makes worse and movement makes better
• After any two hours in the same chair
• Between meetings, when a walk is too much and another sitting is too many

The honest part

The research on small breaks is friendly to movement: the breaks that moved the body were among the ones that left people feeling best. "Undo the hunch" is a feeling, not a posture diagnosis — if something hurts, a physiotherapist beats a puppy.

Reference: Albulescu et al., "'Give me a break!' A systematic review and meta-analysis on the efficacy of micro-breaks", PLOS ONE, 2022. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0272460