Have you ever come home from an 8-hour day of sitting behind a desk feeling like youve just been hit by a dump truck? It really doesnt make much sense does it? After all, you didnt do anything today except sit there typing on your keyboard and mousing around. You may feel tired but at the same time youre not tired. Perhaps a better way to describe your feelings is restless. You have a stiff neck, tired shoulders, a headache, and dont feel like doing anything when you get home. When its time to go to bed you dont go to sleep right away. Instead your restless feelings prevent you from getting the sleep you need. The tired feelings youre experiencing certainly are different than the kind of tiredness you have on the weekends when you have more time for your therapy chores: mindless tasks that require you to move your feet. Mowing the lawn, gardening, painting, and washing the car are examples. When your weekend day is over you feel tired but its a good tired feeling. Not the funky tired feeling you had when you spent the day at the office. And when you go to bed you fall into a deep asleep right away. In the morning you feel recharged and ready to do it all over again. Obviously there are many reasons for why a person might not feel his best after spending the day in an office environment. Work-related stress, attitude, conflict with supervisors and coworkers, office air quality, fast-food lunches, the chair you spend most of your day on, and a poorly focused computer monitor can all be contributors to your ailments. Sometimes the commute just GETTING to the office is enough to malign you with several Desk Jockey symptoms for the entire day. For each of these variables there are steps you can take to mitigate their ill-effects. One of the best approaches to dealing with multi-faceted problems such as this is to deal with the problem in small pieces over time the Divide and Conquer approach. By breaking the problem down into discrete pieces youll have a better chance of sticking to your changes and make the solutions last. This article is Part I of III where we will discuss muscular-skeletal loading associated with sitting. In the first part we will investigate why sitting is really against our genetic programming. In the Part II we will discuss what you can do to mitigate the effects of too much sitting. Finally, in Part III we will identify corrective measures that are designed to offset the mal-effects of too much sitting. How can your chair adversely affect your day? In order to understand why chairs simply are not good for us it helps to take a look back at our history. Genetically speaking, our bodies have the same gene pool today as did our ancestors 100,000 years ago. With that fact in mind, with the exception of the past 100 years, a veritable drop in the bucket of time, what did our forefathers do with their days? They spent their days looking for food, gathering wood, building shelters, hunting, and making tools from animal remains and forestry products. Based on archeological evidence its safe to say they didnt spend much of their time sitting comfortably on chairs. In fact, ancient civilizations reserved seats for royalty. Even the ancient coliseums, with the exception of prime royalty stations, were designed such that the spectators stood to watch the games. Sitting is a relatively new activity. For the majority of the generations before us, most of their days were spent in survival mode: looking for food and shelter. Movement was possible only by standing up and putting one foot in front of the other. There were no seated transport vehicles such as cars, trains and planes. If at least one foot remains on the ground at any time we call this walking. If both feet become airborne at any time we call this running. In the case of walking or running, some constants remain the same. While one foot is moving forward, the opposite arm is moving in the same direction and the same side arm is moving backwards. Muscles in the legs, pelvis and abdomen regions are working in unison to propel the lower extremities throughout the gait cycle. The rhythmic firing of the prime movement muscles increases the demand for oxygen and nutrients to the cells. These demands are satisfying by increased respiratory function (deeper and quicker breathing), increased cardiac output (the heart beats faster) and other heightened bodily functions. Throughout the process the spine is maintained in a relatively upright position. Each segment of the spine is resting naturally on the vertebrae below it. Because the vertebrae columns are neatly stacked there is very little shear force (slippage) between each vertebra. The pelvis region is simultaneously working to propel the legs and provide a stable foundation for the torso and upper extremities. When a modern worker is sitting at his workstation how much lumbo-pelvic (low back and pelvis) interaction is taking place? How much resemblance is there between the seated position and what our ancestors have been doing for all time before us? In many ways the seated position is exactly counter to the way our bodies were engineered. Most seats lock the pelvis in place, allowing for minimal if any movement. If this position is held for long periods of time the little muscles that connect between the vertebras of the spine have virtually nothing to do. This is a perfect example of the if you dont use it you lose it clich. A more clinical term for this is atrophy. Since the pelvic region is locked in place, theres no movement in the spine, particularly the lumbar or lower region of the spine. If theres no movement, it gets trained to stiffen up due to a lack of usage. Most people when sitting at the desk make up for the lack of motion of the pelvis and low back areas by either leaning forward in their seat, such as leaning on their elbows, or slouching. This forward leaning position AND the slouching positions (how many times have you been told to sit up straight as a child?) creates a shear force between the vertebra of the spine. In order for the body to maintain alignment of the spine, the tiny spinal muscles have to work to counteract the forces of gravity resulting from the seated position. If youre sitting for a long duration, your spinal muscles are forced to maintain this unnatural position for the entire duration. Our back muscles were designed for dynamic (changing) loads, not the static (isometric) loads that sitting for long periods of time demand. To demonstrate the difference between dynamic and static loads, raise your arms up to shoulder level as if youre a child pretending to be an airplane. Now hold the position. Even without any weights in your hands your shoulders will quickly tire. In only one or two minutes you will begin to feel the burn from this simple exercise. Another common mechanism the body does to attempt to make the seated position less stressful is to cross the legs. At first glance you might think that crossing the legs has to be a bad thing, and it is. After all, it loads one side of the hip area and the associated lower back muscles while unloading the opposite site. All kinds of torsional forces are at work creating muscular imbalances which always results in postural issues. As problematic as crossing the legs are on muscle balance and posture, the position serves to help prevent the pelvis from slipping forward in the seat. In the crossed leg position, were basically trading a slouched position for a twisted position. Any beginning student of the human body quickly learns that no parts of our body operate in unison. Everything is connected to everything else. When everything is operating according to plan our bodies are an efficient machine that has many built-in redundant systems. When something goes awry, such as maintaining a poor postural position for a period of time it affects seemingly unrelated areas of our body. For example, an ankle injury will create pain. The pain will trigger the brain to try to protect the ankle by reducing the load on the ankle by shifting the load to the other side of the body. This automatic guarded reaction, will eventually overload the muscular-skeletal system on the opposite foot if the ankle injury (root cause) is not brought back to a healthy state. The brain will do the same thing to the head neck and shoulders. When the lower back is held in poor posture for an extended period of time, such as sitting at a computer workstation for even two hours muscles in the upper back, neck and shoulder areas will be called upon to help support the tiring lower back. After several hours in the seated position, the upper body muscles will remain tense, even if the body is put in a more natural walking position, such as at the end of the working day. Of course, it really doesnt help when we jump in our car to go home at the end of the day Again, more sitting and no movement of the legs. By the time we get home our back, neck and shoulder muscles are sore, our legs muscles are under utilized and we have tension headaches just for good measure. We think were tired, and in a sense we are, so we attempt to appease the tiredness by sitting down on a soft sofa and watch television for the next several hours pretty much what weve been doing all day that got us in this condition in the first place. By now you should be pretty convinced that sitting at a desk is not in your bodys best interest. In the second part of this article well be discussing strategies you can employ to neutralize the effects of sitting at your desk all day long. |
