Chronic Sitting, Chronically Hurting

Truth be told, if you continue down the same path you will get the same result.  The solution to various problems may simply be about identifying the issues at hand.  From that, we learn to change our course of action to get a more favourable result.

A New Lifestyle

Since the past two years, the global pandemic has dramatically alter some of our lifestyles.  A key factor is in how we work.  With the introduction of remote work, we actually are finding ourselves sitting down longer periods of time.  Think of the lunchroom meetings that are gone, the walking between office and train/bus station, etc.  Technology has made us ever more stuck on the screen. There may no longer be a need to get up for paper or file.  Everything is mostly electronic in today’s world.

Unfortunately for us, our body is not designed for continuous sitting.  We may be able to tolerate sitting for a few stretches of it.  However when we are referring to everyday, 5 days a week for a year or two.  The amount of stress really does add up to certain muscle groups of our body.  

Sitting and Effects on Our Body

When we sit for a long periods of time, we have taken out the largest group of muscles that supports our body.  Our hip muscles such as gluteus maximus and quadriceps are big muscles that can support the weight from our head down to our hips.  Without the use of these muscles, our body starts to put strain on our back muscles. These includes our illiopsoas to our extensors such as multifidus. On top of that, we start to reduce the use of our front core muscles.  Our abdominals and obliques become disengaged. Think of no using your six packs.

What can We Do?

In general, sitting creates huge imbalance in our body. Imbalances leads to stress and stress leads to strain and pain.  It is important to understand where these imbalances are in your particular situation as symptoms varies.  Through a proper medical assessment conduct by a physiotherapist, we can identify where these strains are.  As well with proper physiotherapy treatment, we can realign ourself to go down the right path.