A 90-Second Office Yoga Sequence To Do Between Meetings

Five moves, no equipment. Leave your shoes on.

A Chief of Staff I’ve been teaching for four years has back-to-back Zoom meetings every day. Camera on for every single one. The first time I asked her how she resets between meetings, she looked at me like I’d asked her what her favorite color was. “There is no in between,” she said.

There is. It’s about 90 seconds long, the gap between when one meeting ends and the next begins.  You’ve clicked Leave but haven’t yet clicked Join. Most of us spend it checking Slack or opening tabs we don’t actually need open. Then we arrive at the next meeting with the previous one still in our heads.

Why 90 Seconds Is the Right Amount

If I told you to do yoga for 60 minutes a day, you wouldn’t. Not because you don’t want to, but because you don’t actually have 60 free minutes in a row. Not with this job. What you do have is 90 seconds. You have it at least eight times a day if you live in a calendar that other people own. That works out to 12 minutes of body care, broken up throughout the day instead of stockpiled into a 5 p.m. yoga class you keep aiming for but never make.

The research is clear: when it comes to undoing what sitting does to a body, frequency beats duration. Short, repeated interruptions of a sedentary pattern do more for metabolic markers and circulation than a single long session at the end of the day. The body responds to how often you remind it, not how long you spend reminding it.

The 90-Second Reset (Timed to the Second)

Here’s the whole sequence. You don’t have to leave your chair. Shoes stay on. Your camera can be off for this. I leave mine on because I don’t mind being the person who visibly moves before a meeting. To my surprise, someone (unconsciously) moves with me.

Move 1: Two cat-cows (15 seconds)

Sit at the front of your chair, feet flat, hands on your thighs. Inhale and lift your chest, look slightly up. Exhale and round your spine, tuck your chin. Do that twice. About 15 seconds, depending on how dramatic you want your breath to be.

I like this version with my hands behind my head for an added chest stretch, and the false perception of being on a beach in Hawaii. I’ll take what I can get.

Move 2: Three shoulder rolls and one chest opener (15 seconds)

Roll your shoulders backward three times. Be dramatic and make them big and slow. Then interlace your fingers behind your back, straighten your arms, and lift your chest toward the ceiling. Hold for one breath. Release.

I can’t take myself too seriously when I do these. You shouldn’t either.

Move 3: One twist each way (20 seconds)

Sit tall. Right hand on your left thigh, left hand on the back of your chair. Inhale and lengthen your spine. Exhale and twist left. One breath. Switch sides. One breath.  You can breathe out loud here. I usually do.

I teach longer office yoga sequences in training here.

Move 4:  Ear to shoulder, each side (20 seconds)

Drop your right ear toward your right shoulder. Rest your right hand on the left side of your head. Don’t pull,  just let the weight of your hand be the stretch. One breath. Switch sides. One breath. This one releases the upper trapezius, the thick, rope-like muscle that runs from the base of your skull to your shoulder. The traps have been overworking to hold your head in a ‘tech neck’ position for the last hour.

Move 5: One round of box breath (20 seconds)

I learned this technique, originally called “Square Breathing,” from one of my teachers, Dharma Mittra. The first time we did it in training, the practice lasted over an hour. I won’t make you do that.

Inhale through your nose for four counts. Hold for four. Exhale through your nose for four. Hold for four. That’s one cycle, exactly 16 seconds, and it will drop your heart rate before you click Join.

That’s a total of 90 seconds. No incense required.

Aside: for the yoga teachers reading, short, specific sequences like this, designed for people who will never unroll a mat, are most of what we teach in the Office Yoga Teacher Training. If conference rooms sound more interesting than studios, that’s a real career.

When to Do It

Set the rule once and never decide again: when a meeting ends, you don’t click into the next one until you’ve done the sequence. The Leave button is the cue. If your calendar is wall-to-wall and the next meeting has already started without you, you have my permission to be 90 seconds late. Nobody is taking attendance. 

What Changes After a Week

You won’t notice much on day one. The win of day one is just remembering to do it. By day four, two things tend to happen. First, you stop arriving at meetings carrying the last one on your shoulders. Second, somewhere around 3 p.m., you’ll notice you’re not as wrung out as you usually are. Most of us have decided that the late-afternoon exhaustion, with our eyes glazed and nap-seeking, is just what a workday feels like. It’s not. It’s what eight back-to-back meetings without a body in between them feels like.

One More Thing

My Chief of Staff client now does this between every meeting. Her camera stays on. She doesn’t apologize. She does not, in her words, “explain it,” because explaining it would defeat the purpose. Last quarter, she got promoted. I’m not going to claim the 90-second reset got her the job. But she did tell me she ran one round of box breath right before the meeting where they offered it to her.

If you’re a yoga teacher who’d rather work in conference rooms than studios, that’s what we train people to do. Office Yoga Teacher Training.