4 Commercial Break Moves That Sculpt Your Body While Watching
We’ve all been there—settling into the couch for our favorite show, promising ourselves we’ll hit the gym tomorrow. But what if those commercial breaks could become mini workout sessions that actually transform your body? Instead of mindlessly scrolling your phone during ads, you can use those 2-3 minute windows to sculpt muscle, boost energy, and reset your posture. Here are four simple moves that will help you maximize your TV time and see real results.
4 Commercial Break Moves That Sculpt Your Body
Chair Squats Target Your Biggest Muscle Groups
How to do it: This one is actually quite simple. You are simply going to sit up nice and straight with your feet on the floor, sitting on the edge of your chair or couch. From there, you’re simply going to stand up to a nice tall posture, then you’re simply going to sit back down into the beginning position.
Time: 45 to 60 seconds.
Targets: The chair squat targets all of your lower body muscles, including your glutes, quads, and hamstrings.
Why it works: These are some of the largest muscles in the body, making them excellent targets for blood sugar regulation and calorie expenditure. They can also help you realign your pelvis after sitting.
Modification: If standing and sitting is too much for your body, we would modify this exercise to do sitting marches. Sitting marches is exactly as it sounds, you simply sit tall at the edge of your seat and march in place.
Common mistakes: Common mistakes when squatting include: leaning forward too much with your torso, letting your knees cave in when you stand or sit back down, and trying to sit down too fast. Being sure that you control the descent back into your chair will help prevent the most injuries and discomfort.
Push-Ups Give You Upper Body Strength
How to do it: Get on the ground on all fours and walk your hands slightly in front of your shoulders, keeping them about shoulder width apart with fingers pointed straight ahead. From there, you can either stay on your knees or come up off your knees onto your toes so that you are in a plank position. From there, gently tuck your chin so the back of your neck is long, and keep your spine and your pelvis in neutral. Begin by slowly bending your elbows and allowing your shoulder blades to come together as you lower your chest towards the ground. When you’re about 2 to 3 inches from the ground, slowly begin to reverse the motion by straightening your elbows and pushing your shoulder blades apart.
Time: Do as many as you can in 60 seconds. In the early going, you may only be able to do one or two and have to stop; that’s OK Just stick with it, and within a month or so, you should have no problem doing 30 to 60 seconds of push-ups.
Why it works: The pecs and triceps are the main muscles utilized in a push-up. These happen to be relatively large muscle groups that can store a lot of glucose. As long as we maintain a tucked chin and a neutral pelvis, these are also great to help improve our postural stability.
Target: Pec major, Pec minor, shoulders, triceps, serratus anterior, and core.
Modification: If push-ups from the toes or the knees are too much, you can consider doing the push-ups off the edge of your couch. If that is too much, you can move on and do your push-ups against the wall.
Common mistakes: Allowing your pelvis and belly to drop towards the ground first, reaching forward with your head toward the ground, and holding your breath.
Plank Crunches Reset Your Core and Posture
How to do it: Begin in a forearm plank either on your toes or on your knees. From there, simply bring one knee and the opposite elbow together. Ideally, they will meet at midline. Don’t try to keep a flat spine—allow your back to round as you crunch. Alternate back and forth between your left elbow and right knee and your right elbow and left knee.
Time: 30 to 60 seconds
Target: Strengthens the deep core muscles while improving spinal flexibility. This one really helps reset the posture after sitting. It can also help us improve our brain function, as any exercise that crosses the midline stimulates the corpus callosum.
Modification: Bird dogs. For the bird dog, assume the same position that you did above, either on your toes or on your knees, this time in a straight arm plank position. From there, simultaneously lift your left arm and your right leg off the ground as far as you feel safe and comfortable, and hold them off the ground for around five seconds. Then simply return them to the starting position and do the other side.
Common mistakes: Letting the pelvis drop towards the floor, extending the neck to look up at the sky, trying to go too fast, and trying to keep a straight spine.
T8/9 ELDOA Decompresses Your Spine
How to do it: Sit on the floor with your knees bent and your hands on your shins, sit up as tall as you can, and gently tuck your chin while pushing your head straight back. Maintaining your straight spine, reach both of your arms directly out in front of you, spread your fingers, bend your wrists bac,k and turn your entire arms open. I always like to use the analogy of your arms looking like Spider-Man shooting a web. From there, simply start to slowly raise your arms up over your head and try to reach up to the ceiling. You should feel your shoulder blades reach up towards your ears. Be sure to keep your jaw relaxed, your eyes looking down towards the floor, and breathe from your belly.
Time: Hold it for 60 seconds. The time begins once you’re in the full posture, not as you’re working your way into it.
Target: This targets your entire fascial system, all of your spinal muscles, and all of the spinal proprioceptors with an emphasis on the T8/T9 junction.
Why it works: The ELDOA decompresses the vertebrae, hydrates and nourishes the disc while resetting spinal alignment. This is the perfect exercise for correcting poor sitting posture.
Modification: Do the same thing, but instead of sitting on the floor, just sit at the edge of your seat.
Common mistakes: Holding your breath, looking up with your eyes, not reaching your shoulder blades up to your ears, and clenching your jaw.
How to Structure Your Commercial Break Workouts
You have two simple options: Option one—do all four movements back to back during one commercial break for a mini full-body reset. Option two—spread them out over multiple commercial breaks, one exercise per break so that you are constantly breaking up your sitting time. If I were to choose one, I would encourage you to spread them out, doing one exercise, if you can, for the entirety of each commercial.
Why These Quick Bursts Actually Work
My top three reasons commercial break exercises can be effective for body sculpting and toning are:
Blood sugar control: Second only to the liver, skeletal muscle is where we store the largest amount of glucose. Every time we get up and move, even if it’s only for 2 to 3 minutes and create contractions with our muscles, we start to utilize our stored blood sugar. As we consistently use up this blood sugar, it allows storage to open up for any new glucose calories we may consume. Additionally, musculoskeletal contractions, i.e. squats, push-ups, really any movement increase our insulin sensitivity. This means we use less insulin to store glucose, therefore easing up the workload on our pancreas.
Posture reset: Within 20 minutes of sitting, our muscular system relaxes and we are left to support our load with our ligaments. This is called ligamentous creep—it’s a slow stretching that strains ligaments and tendons, this is often the reason you feel stiff and achy after sitting down. By getting up and moving during commercials, we break that cycle allowing the muscular system to reengage and support our joints.
General calorie expenditure: By simply getting up and moving, or even just sitting and moving, we add to our daily total of calories burned. And as everyone knows, essential to losing weight is burning calories. It may not seem like much, but 2 to 3 minutes at a time 5 to 6 times over the course of a couple hours really does add up.
The Magic of Consistency
The real magic isn’t in one round of squats, it’s in the habit. By sprinkling these moves in anytime you sit down to watch TV you can sculpt and tone your muscles, improve your blood sugar and protect your posture and joints. Over time these little bursts really add up to create long-term body changes. It’s really about creating new easy-to-do habits that can last a lifetime.
What Results Can You Expect?
Realistically, if you can do these exercises every time you sit down to watch TV in the course of a month, you should start to notice toned muscles in your arms, legs and core, better posture with less back pain and neck stiffness, steady energy and fewer blood sugar crashes, and a general younger feeling body that moves freely.
Start Where You Are
My best word of advice if you feel intimidated—start with the modifications. If you start easy, you’re much more likely to stick with it. When the easy stuff gets too easy or boring, then move on to the next level of difficulty. Even 20 seconds of marching in place or a wall push-up is better than staying glued to the couch. The goal isn’t perfection, it’s progress. Every commercial break is a chance to create new habits to sculpt your body, protect your spine and regulate your energy.
Looking for more easy ways to lose fat? Here’s How Long Your Walking Workout Should Be To Shrink Belly Fat.
