Hey, Dr. Rae here with Pro Holistic Care. Today I want to talk about how sitting may be ruining your life.
How Sitting Affects Your Spine
Low back pain is the biggest cause of chronic pain in the United States and one of the biggest reasons that we see patients. There are a lot of things factoring into why there is so much low back pain.
One of the things that we see the most is that people are sitting. A lot of us work at computers all day. We’re sitting at a desk all day. Even with people working from home now, what’s happening is they’re sitting a lot. When we’re sitting, things start to happen to our spine.
One of the most common problems is that when we’re sitting, it’s really hard for us to maintain really good posture over time because we’re not thinking about it. We kind of start to slouch and bend forward, and this can put a lot of pressure on our low back and also our neck.
I think a lot of us have heard of text neck, which is another big problem, but today we’re talking about low back pain.
Sitting and Spinal Degeneration
The more we sit, the longer we sit, and the more slouched we get, the more we really start to degenerate the spine. Over time, that puts a lot of pressure on our bones. It can speed up the formation of arthritis. It puts a lot of pressure on our discs, and it can start to cause degeneration in our discs.
If our discs start to degenerate, that puts a lot of pressure on the nerves. All of this works together to really cause problems for us.
Strategies to Combat Sitting All Day
There are a couple of things we can do to combat the need to sit all of the time, right? We can’t quit our jobs or get a new profession most of the time. What we really need to do is come up with strategies we can use every day while we’re working or when we’re sitting if we have to.
Maybe you’re someone who drives for work. This applies to you as well.
Set Up an Ergonomically Correct Workstation
If you’re sitting at a desk, the number one thing you can do is start to set up your workstation so you’re ergonomically correct.
I’m pretty short, so right now, if I were working at this desk, this would be a big problem for me. We want to think about 90-degree angles.
We want to lift the chair up high so our head and eyes are at 90 degrees with our screen. Our elbows should be as close as we can get to 90 degrees with the desk. We’re not like this, and we’re not down like that.
You can see that, for me, because I’m short, if I lift that chair up, my feet are dangling. I would want to put a box here and put my feet on it so that I’m getting 90 degrees with my neck, 90 degrees with my arms, and 90-degree angles with my hips, knees, and feet.
If you set up your desk to be ergonomically correct right away, you’re going to sit with better posture. You’re going to stop slouching so much. You’re not going to have to move and tweak your body into weird positions to be able to do what you need to do.
That is a really good strategy for making sure that you are minimizing the stress and strain on the low back.
Get Up and Move Regularly
The other thing that’s really, really, really important is getting up and moving. Moving is how we avoid degeneration in our spine, bones, and joints.
If we get up and move around, that’s how our body pushes blood flow to our joints. It gets our muscles hydrated. It keeps our joints nice, mobile, and hydrated as well.
Overall, getting up and moving every 30 minutes to one hour is a huge, huge help for those of us who have to sit for a long time every day.
Set a timer. If you’re sitting at your desk, set a timer for 30 minutes, 45 minutes, or an hour. Get up, walk, and do a lap around the room a couple of times.
If you really want to make it healthy, go over and get a glass of water every 30 minutes to an hour. You could do a couple of jumping jacks. You can do some stretches.
If you do have back pain, look for a low back pain stretch video. Those are some great stretches you can do even at work.
Keep these strategies in mind to help reduce the low back pain that’s happening from sitting.
