Does this sound like you?
Clock into work at 9 am, maybe a quarter after. Log into your email account, check the inbox for the 100 emails you received overnight and meticulously answer them all. Sit at your tight work space where your chair is clearly not set up for your body for 3 hours as you answer email after email, until it’s time to go to the bathroom or break for lunch. At lunch you break to get a salad and remind yourself, “This is my way of staying healthy.” After your salad is eaten, you start browsing your Facebook feed and Twitter (all done sitting outside with your neck bent far forward.) Thirty minutes go by and you realize you need to be back in the office for your afternoon meeting. After sitting and listening to your manager chat about numbers and quarterly projections, you return to your desk to assume the working position and try your hardest to hit your numbers.
Sounds like your day?
Work. It’s something we all do to make sure we can pay the bills. A typical work day is different for everyone, but one thing is becoming more common in the workplace–sitting! New Yorkers are trending towards more sedentary jobs, and these jobs come with some serious potential health effects. More and more New Yorkers are sitting throughout the day, and sitting with bad posture to boot. The head is jutted forward, the shoulders are rounded forward, and there is major compression taking place at the lower back and neck. This bad posture isn’t something we were born with, but rather a learned bad habit. Poor posture is correlated with neck pain, low back pain, shoulder pain, depression, increased fatigue, and poorer breathing habits. What most people don’t realize is that these effects are carried throughout ALL aspects of life, not just work! Poor posture simply makes you less athletic, and causes a variety of health issues!
Good posture should and will carry over to other aspects of life. If you sit like a turtle all day and go home and try to run a few miles, you are going to feel slow and sluggish. If you constantly are putting bad forces through your lumbar spine, you will never be able to complete your deadlift sets with proper form and without pain. Posture is paramount in everything we do as humans. In this series, we will identify simple ways to achieve better posture.
If you find that you have difficulties maintaining good posture, and you’re not sure where to start, our Doctors of Physical Therapy can help! Please schedule a visit with us by filling out this form.
