While sitting may seem like common sense (after all, you’ve been sitting your whole life), if you experience back pain or shoulder pain or headaches after a day at the office, your style of sitting could be contributing to your problems. Sitting for too many hours—at work, in the car, or in front of the TV—can take a toll on your body’s muscles and joints, especially if you slouch or sit with your legs crossed or one leg under your butt. Here’s why: Your spine has curves that act as shock absorbers. When you sit, you round your spine, which eliminates the curves. This creates an unequal distribution of pressure along your spine and back. Over time and with poor sitting habits, this extra pressure can lead to tension headaches, disc problems, and pain in your lower back and shoulders. Check out the keys to proper sitting technique below, then continue reading to see if you’re guilty of one of the four common seated positions that can hurt your body. These popular seated positions may be wreaking havoc on your body.
Crossing Legs at the Knee When you sit with your legs crossed, you irritate the area around your fibular head, just below the knee, which can pinch the peronial nerve. Crossing your legs also alters your pelvic position, placing additional pressure on your hip muscles and sciatic nerve. This throws off your SI (sacroiliac) joint and pelvis, which attach to your lower back, and can lead to long-term nerve irritation and back pain. The fix: First, do your best to keep your legs uncrossed. If you find yourself sitting with your legs crossed, do the Leg Cradle - Supine. This movement helps stretch out your hip muscles that can tighten up from sitting in this position. Slouching is common in people with desk jobs. When you slouch, your head pushes forward and out of alignment, which makes your muscles work harder to hold it up. This pressure puts stress on your shoulders and neck and can lead to tension headaches. A slouched position also puts extra pressure on an already compressed spine, leading to lower back pain.
The Fix: Put a pop-up reminder on your computer telling you to stand up and do a posture check. This will help you become more aware of your sitting position. You can also use a lumbar roll or a small towel in the small of your back to maintain a more upright posture. Add the upward dog yoga position and Standing Y's and T's to your fitness routine to extend your upper body and lower back. Crossing Legs Under Each Other Placing your legs under one another in a bent position, often referred to as pretzel-style, rotates your hip and knee joints in a way that puts pressure on them. This can lead to tight hamstrings and knee and hip pain. Over time, it can irritate the meniscus cartilage in the knee and put added stress on the hip capsule from the constant rotation. The Fix: If you find yourself sitting pretzel-style, quickly untwist your legs. Aim to break this habit over time. To help counteract the pressure on your hips and knees, add the Foam Roll - IT Band and Handwalks to your routine.
This will help stretch your muscles and relieve pressure on your hips and knees. One Leg Up, One Leg Down When you sit with one leg up on your chair and the other one hanging down, you're causing your pelvis to rotate in a way that it normally wouldn't and keep it from rotating naturally. Consistently performing this motion can lead to sacroiliitis, or an inflammation of the SI joints, a common cause of lower back pain and lack of stability. The Fix: While your first line of defense is to kick this habit, there are also ways to counteract it. Bring stability back to your body and ease lower back pain by adding Glute Bridges to your routine. Place a small pillow or ball between your knees while performing this movement. It helps fire up your abs and hip muscles, while improving your strength and stability.Although it’s “just a desk job,” working in an office can wreak absolute havoc on our bodies. If you’re somebody who spends all day at a desk and computer (which I’m guessing applies to a majority of the Nerd Fitness Rebellion), you know exactly what I’m talking about.
Whether it’s lower back pain, wrist pain, a really tight neck, or a lack of mobility, when we spend all day at a desk to pay the bills, our bodies often get stuck picking up the tab. What can we do to counteract this office life we have to live? Although I’ve done some crazy things like exercise around the world, most of my time is spent sitting at a desk for 10+ hours a day, connecting with readers, writing articles, and watching stupid cat videos on YouTube. I feel like I’ve cracked the code for staying limber despite sitting all day, and I want to share it with my fellow desk-dwellers! If you work a desk job, you probably spend more time at your desk than you do at anything else in your life. And yet, that time is often spent sitting in a chair that’s too low, with a desk that’s too high, and our necks bent down looking at a screen at an angle that makes us feel like Quasimodo. That can result in all sorts of nasty stuff, like eyestrain, shoulder pain, back pain, arm pain, wrist pain, and neck pain.
Desk jobs might not seem physically taxing, but they can certainly cause us some physical problems. If you’re going to level up your office life, it’s time to do a desk audit. So let’s start with setting your desk chair at the proper height so you can type without scrunching your shoulders up. I swear, 90% of desk/chair combos, in offices or in coffee shops have this ratio wrong. You want to sit in a chair at a height where you can sit with your shoulders relaxed and pulled back, you’re sitting up tall, and your forearms are parallel to the ground or or lower, meaning you don’t need to reach up to your keyboard, nor shrug your shoulders. I can tell when I work at a desk that’s the wrong height, and you probably can too: my shoulders shrug up, I get tense, and my neck bothers me for the next few days. So, set your desk at the right height for you! 1. PICK A GREAT CHAIR: You probably spend more than a third of your existence at a desk chair, so do what you can to make sure you’re setting in a chair that is not destroying your spine!
Last year, in an effort to fix my back issues, I bought a great desk chair (the Herman Miller chair). Honestly, it’s been fantastic, and my back feels great sitting in it for extended periods of time. But, I know it’s incredibly pricey. You don’t need to spend hundreds of dollars on a great chair (unless you can afford it) – you simply need a chair that has an adjustable height so you can set it so your feet are comfortably on the floor, a solid cushion to sit on, and good lower back support. If your company supplied you with a crappy office chair, ask for the money to buy a good one (“it’ll improve my productivity!”), and head to an office supply store and try out a bunch of chairs. If they won’t pay for it, consider making the upgrade yourself. A quick search on Amazon revealed this chair that has the best reviews ever – not bad for $150! 2. SET YOUR MONITOR AND DESKTOP PROPERLY: If you work with a laptop, you are spending most of your day hunched over a tiny keyboard and trackpad.
Even if you work with a desktop computer, it’s certainly possible the monitor is not high enough for you to be able to not have to tilt your head down to look at it. You want the height of your monitor to be such that you can look straight ahead and not have to adjust your neck angle to view the screen. After spending a few years hunched over a laptop, I fixed my posture by adjusting where my eyes have to look by drastically raising the height of my monitors. Just raising my viewing angle was enough to get me to stop slouching, I no longer shrug my shoulders for hours, and my spine/back/shoulders/neck no longer hate me! You don’t need anything fancy. I even just added some books to get the right height: You don’t need to spend a lot of money to change your setup, and I’ve found that the inexpensive solutions above were well worth the money invested. Feel free to prop your monitor up with whatever you have around. For laptop users, a separate keyboard and mouse can alleviate a lot of the “cramped” feelings and prevent you from ending up hunched over a laptop.
IF YOU WANT TO REALLY NERD OUT: check out this cool site from Ergotron (note: not a member of the Autobots). Simply put in your height and it can help you determine the height of your chair, keyboard, and monitor. Now, if you have Quad Desk, or a Dwight Schrute exercise ball, you will probably have a different set of problems on your hands. This should get you started with setting your desk up to win. But what about the rest of the day when you’re not sitting? Along with having a properly constructed office or cubicle, there are a few other things you can do to combat officitis: THE MOST IMPORTANT THING – don’t stay in the same position for hours upon hours! Studies suggest the best plan for prolonged spinal health is to consistently alter your work environment – move around, stand when possible, sit…just don’t sit in the same position for 8 straight hours! Set a timer every twenty minutes, and get up and do something! Take a lap around the office, do some shoulder rolls, neck rolls, or twists.
I use a program called “focus booster” that pings me every 20 minutes to get up and do something (take a lap around NF HQ – my apartment – or do a quick stretch). If you have your own office, or you work in a cubicle and don’t mind getting some funny looks, feel free to try some of the following: The Couch Stretch: because I’m on my ass all day, my hip flexors tend to get tight. So I make sure to do a two minute-couch stretch every single day to help open up my hips: The Thoracic Bridge Stretch (Hat tip to my buddy James Clear for finding this): Consider dropping down into a basic body weight Grok Squat: To answer your final question: you do not NEED a standing desk, even though the internet has a LOT to say about sitting all day. I often stand when doing basic tasks like checking email or chatting with Team NF, but I really struggle with writing creatively while standing, so I’m almost ALWAYS seated for article writing. If you ARE interested in a standing desk, we’ve actually already written a whole article about it on Nerd Fitness a few years back, but most of the ergonomic advice from the regular chair carries over.