The modern lifestyle involves a tremendous amount of sitting. Many of us are glued to our desks, slouched over a computer screen or paper, and once we get off work, we spend our free time hunched over our computer screen or lounging on the sofa with a drink.
Sedentary Lifestyle Risks
Since our spines have evolved over the last hundreds of thousands of years to support us as hunters and gatherers, not sitters, you would expect that being mostly sedentary throughout our lives would leave some serious negative repercussions.
Sedentary Lifestyle Effects On Muscles
Workplace medicine is a well-threaded field. There seem to be as many reviews of previous research on the relation between back pain and sedentary working condition as there are actual studies on the topic.
Most of the reviewers point to the same good news: sitting at your desk from eight to five doesn’t seem to cause any significant level of damage to the spine or back. (At least not to the cohorts involved, which looked to us like a relevant cross-section of the general population). Athletes seem to be most at risk of spinal injury.
Sitting And Back Pain – Don’t Over Do It!
A study conducted by the University of Qatar on back pain and sedentarism among University employees found a direct correlation between spending too much time in chairs and backaches.
Out of the 479 colleagues they questioned, 293, or 61% percent, reported lower or upper back pain. As if that wasn’t enough, it seems that excessive sitters also tend to be more depressed, with a significant correlation between sedentary work and a self-reported depressed mood.
Also, “excessive” is what one might call the number of monthly working hours your average South-Korean was expected to work back in 2010. A study on a cohort of just under 15,000 Korean adults of all ages established that sitting down more than seven hours a day can cause back pains, the severity of which increases the longer you spend on a chair and the older you are.
So, to conclude, a typical eight-hour workday at the desk might not stress our spines too much, but longer than that is dangerous territory.
Shifting In Your Seat Ain’t That Bad!
For one, maintaining proper posture, like what our elementary school teacher told us, should work very well for the spine, although it might fatigue our back muscles at first. However, futzing around in your chair is a lot better than sitting tightly.
A 2019 study on call center employees found that those who changed posture and position a lot while seated reported significantly less back strain than their “stiffer” counterparts.
It seems there’s little to gather from this since most of us change our sited position to what feels comfortable without giving it a thought. But being too focused on whatever mental activity we might be doing can make us “freeze in place,” as it were, for literal hours on end.
You don’t need to apply some mental exercise to avoid straining your back from lack of movement; try being less tense at work and let your body handle the rest.
Give Your Back A Break!
Don’t forget to rise from your chair and walk around from time to time. You can spend half of your waking hours seated without developing chronic spinal problems, but that doesn’t mean you should do them all in one go.
Always take your hourly break at work; there will be plenty of sitting around to do at home.
Ironically, smokers don’t face the problem of getting glued to their office chairs, so walking outside or going up and down the stairs will provide them with some exercise.
Best Way to Exercise?
It might seem intuitive that we should ease our bodies into physical strain after long hours of idleness at work or home. Well, light exercising is never insufficient, but it’s not the best we can do either.
There are different opinions regarding the usefulness of stretching and warm-ups outside of professional sports. Research suggests that vigorous physical exercise is one of the best things we can do for our spines after hours of sitting down. And there is further research to back this conclusion.
So forget about a nice walk in the park after a mentally exhausting day at work; just hit the gym or squash court!
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