Having Lower Back Pain? Here Are 7 Ways to Check If You Have Good Posture When Sitting
There are a number of myths surrounding the concept of “good posture” and it’s especially important to recognize these myths when sitting.
There are a number of myths surrounding the concept of “good posture” and it’s especially important to recognize these myths when sitting.
For example, “good posture” doesn’t mean being planted in your work chair in a fixed, upright position, holding in your abdomen and pulling your shoulders down and back.
Good or healthy posture means sitting in a way that allows freedom of movement of your entire body in any direction, as needed.
Try this.
Without changing anything about your posture, observe whether you can:
1. Turn your head to the right and left?
2. Turn your head and torso (shoulders and ribcage) to the right and left?
3. Can you breath freely into both your chest and abdomen?
If you’re engaging your abdominal muscles, you cannot breathe easily. In fact, when your abdomen is engaged, your diaphragm is drawn in and up, and your entire ribcage and back will be rigid and not able to move freely.
Your skeleton, and not your muscles, should do the primary work of holding you upright.
In order to see if you’re using your skeleton to support you in sitting, check:
1. Are both of your feet flat on the floor?
2. Are you sitting evenly on both sides of your bottom?
Sitting asymmetrically on one side can cause strain. (Some men already know this and remove their wallets from their back pocket when sitting!) When the weight of the body is distributed evenly over both sitting bones, your back doesn't have to work as hard.
3. Is your lower back rounded or slightly arched?
A slightly arched lower back offers better support and reduces pressure on the discs.
4. Are you leaning back in your chair or sitting forward in your seat?
Most people slump and round onto the back of their pelvis when leaning back. This causes muscular stiffness and strain. If you must lean back, place a pillow behind the small of your back so that a healthy arch is maintained.
For more information about sitting dynamically on your pelvis to prevent back, shoulder and neck pain, see my blog post called “Here's the Right Way to Sit in a Chair to Relieve Lower Back Pain”
If you’d like to experience more mobility in your pelvis so that you your back, neck and shoulder muscles are no longer responsible for holding you up in gravity, check out this recording of “Sit Like a Pro,” a recording of a short workshop that teaches you the tools that will give you comfort and ease when sitting.
Here's the Right Way to Sit in a Chair to Relieve Lower Back Pain
Two of the most common activities so many of us do for hours each day are sitting at work and driving.
Two of the most common activities so many of us do for hours each day are sitting at work and driving.
As a Feldenkrais practitioner and massage therapist, I’ve found that most people who come to me with concerns about discomfort in sitting have the idea that if they could just find the “right” chair and the “right” way to sit in that chair, they would be able to engage in sedentary activities for hours without moving.
I’ve had clients who beat themselves up because they feel they’ve been told that if they only held in their abdominal muscles all day, they’d somehow protect their backs. Or if they only held their shoulders down and back, their posture would be improved, and they’d avoid back, shoulder and neck pain while sitting. (Here are 7 quick check-ins with your body to learn whether you’re sitting the most efficiently.)
The human body is not well adapted for long hours spent sitting in a restrictive or constrained posture.
As a graphic artist for 20 years, I’d spend hours each day at my drawing table (I’m aging myself!!) and computer, doing detail work and barely coming up for air. I accepted the pain I often felt in my lower back and along the side of my right leg, and got my work done.
I tried to make up for the 8+ hours of sitting still with a few hours of yoga, stretching and running each week. And although working out was healthy, and I felt better after yoga and stretching, it didn’t change or fix the daily discomfort I lived with.
Now, many years later, after years of training and practice as a movement expert, I have found the main key to comfortable sitting.
Your pelvis is the foundation of your entire body when you sit.
For most of us, when we’re sitting all day at work or in the car for long periods of time, it’s typical to sit or roll back onto the back of the pelvis.
We get stuck in our chairs—meaning we sit statically and barely move, and this teaches us that we need to use our muscles to deal with sitting instead of our bones.
What I mean by this is that we think we need to keep something “engaged” to protect ourselves or keep ourselves upright (like “engaging our core” or back, or jaw or neck or shoulder muscles).
But if we were to learn to use our skeleton to support us, our entire musculature would be free of tension.
The key to this skeletal support is at the foundation when you sit—your pelvis!
Your pelvis actually has the ability to move in a variety of directions. tilt forwards so that you have a slight arch in your lower back, backwards so that you round your spine, to the left and right so that you side bend, and around in a circle. But for most of the day, we sit statically on the surface of our chair.
The more your pelvis is able to move in all these directions, the more you can control any discomfort in your back when you’re sitting. The muscles no longer need to be 100% responsible for keeping you upright in gravity because you’re sitting dynamically on your base — your pelvis.
Click here to learn how to set up your work space specifically for your body.
If you’d like to experience more mobility in your pelvis so that you your back, neck and shoulder muscles are no longer responsible for holding you up in gravity, check out this recording of “Sit Like a Pro,” a short workshop that teaches you the tools that will give you comfort and ease when sitting.
3 Keys to Comfortable, Effortless, Lower Back Pain-Free Sitting at Work
Many people experience discomfort when we sit for extended periods of time. And most of us have tried a variety of different things to remedy this discomfort — whether it’s back pain, neck or shoulder pain, hip pain, or sciatica.
Many people experience discomfort when we sit for extended periods of time. And most of us have tried a variety of different things to remedy this discomfort — whether it’s back pain, neck or shoulder pain, hip pain, or sciatica.
In my blog post “The Myth About Core Strengthening and Why It Might Not Help Lower Back Pain” I write about how “engaging your core,” or abdominal muscles, is not a solution to preventing back pain — especially when you’re sitting at your desk or in the car for hours.
Engaging or contracting abdominal muscles seems to be one of the more popular “solutions” according to google searches and the collective physical therapy consciousness.
I used to believe this too.
As a graphic artist for 20+ years, I’d hunker down at my drawing table (I’m aging myself!!) and then at my desktop into the position I thought was best, and got my work done.
For many years, I tolerated lower back pain and sciatica and accepted it as part of my life. I practiced yoga and worked out a few times each week because I knew that moving my body was important. And this received the discomfort for short periods of time, but it felt like the discomfort was a constant struggle.
Years later, as a massage therapist, my clients would often complain about how much they sit and how they worked out, stretched, engaged their core abdominal muscles, and forced their shoulders down and away from their ears to have “better posture.”
Many of their firms hired work space experts to set everyone up with standing desks, ergonomically correct chairs and work stations, and still, they were in pain and discomfort.
They felt guilty and frustrated because in their minds, they were doing all the things they were told would help, but they still had back, shoulder and neck pain.
It was frustrating for me not to be able to help them find relief for more than a couple of days.
Now, as a movement practitioner, I know there are 3 keys to comfortable, effortless, painfree sitting.
1. Eyes
Your body and spine organize around where you’re looking.
In other words, if you’re looking downwards at your laptop screen, your neck bends and your entire spine follows because your entire spine is made up of individual articulating bones (or vertebrae).
Your heavy head pulls the top of your spine (your neck) downward. Then your entire spine (chain of vertebrae) follows.
The lower end of this chain of vertebrae ends at your pelvis. Your pelvis rolls backwards to complete the rounding of your spine. And this is where you stay most of the day while your back and neck muscles work overtime to hold you in place.
2. Breath
When you’re engaging your abdominal muscles, you aren’t breathing freely and easily.
Try this: sit in a chair and engage your abdomen. Take few deep breaths in and out and notice the effect on your diaphragm, chest and belly.
Also notice how your entire middle back and ribcage are rigid. There’s minimal movement. This indicates that you’re also not moving the entire middle section of your back when you sit — the 12 vertebrae that are each attached to a rib.
This makes your neck vertebrae and lower back vertebrae and the muscles that support them have to work harder — leading to neck and back muscle pain.
Now, try this: allow your belly to be soft. With a relaxed belly, take a few deep breaths in and out. Notice how your belly and chest and sides of your ribs expand when you inhale. Observe how your diaphragm moves when you breathe. There’s a softening in your ribs and the muscles of your middle back don’t have to work.
3. Pelvis
Your pelvis is the foundation of your body when you’re sitting, and it must be able to move dynamically.
This means that you need to be able to move your pelvis — the foundation of where you’re weight bearing— as you sit on whatever seat you’re sitting, as opposed to sitting in a passive, static, rigid way.
When your pelvis learns to move in response to the seat you’re sitting on, your entire spine will respond by rounding and arching, rotating, and side bending naturally and spontaneously. We do all of these micro movements thousands of times each hour.
So for most of us, when we’re sitting all day either at work or in the car or plane, we’re not very lively on the base of our pelvis.
It’s typical to sit on the back of the sitting bones and sacrum. And the spine has to round, and then, the neck juts forward to accommodate the pelvis. (And we stay here for most of the day, get up and stretch, and then resume this position.)
When we’re sitting rigidly, movement is not possible and that’s when the muscles of our back, neck, shoulders and hips have to work overtime to hold us up in gravity.
We get stuck in our chairs and over time, that teaches us that we need to use muscles to deal with sitting instead of our bones. To learn how you can easily set up your work space for the healthiest alignment for your specific body, click here.
We think we need to keep something “engaged” to protect ourselves or keep ourselves upright (like “engaging our core” or back, neck or shoulder muscles).
So what is the solution to sitting without back pain?
Learning to be more mobile from the base of the pelvis and sitting bones, up through the spine willl allow the musculature to be free to act or respond to each moment. The more able your pelvis is able to move in all the directions, the freer your spine (back and neck) will be and the less muscular contraction and effort is needed. To learn more about how to sit in a chair comfortably to prevent back pain, click here.
If you’d like to learn more about how to sit so that your neck, shoulders and back can be comfortable and pain-free, please check out this 90-minute workshop.
4 Better Posture Practices for Sitting at a Desk All Day
Sitting at a desk and staring at a computer is a common activity for so many of us these days. Now, more than ever, your work station set up is so critical to your own and your family's comfort and health.
Sitting at a desk and staring at a computer is a common activity for so many of us these days. Your work station set up is so critical to your comfort and health.
The position we place ourselves in for many hours each day has a significant impact on our bodies and one hour of yoga or stretching or working out doesn't magically reverse the damage we do to our spines during 8 hours of slumping and rounding and rolling backward on our pelvic bones.
Here are some tips for ensuring an ergonomically sound set up for your workday:
1. Start with your eyes. Your entire musculoskeletal system will organize around where you are looking, so set up your computer screen directly in front of where you will be looking the majority of the time. In other words, as you sit slouched on your sofa with your laptop on your lap (as I'm doing as I write this now), or at the dining table, notice that you have to look downwards. Just notice what you do with your eyes, neck and spine.
Essentially what’s happening is that your heavy head pulls your spine along behind it. One or two hours, here and there, is okay. But 8+ hours each day, 5 days/week will have an effect on your overall well-being.
2. Find a chair with a firm flat seat that allows you to sit with your thighs parallel to the floor and your feet flat on the floor directly under your knees. The firm seat will allow you to sense and feel your contact with your pelvic bones. Try rolling your pelvis a little bit backwards and feel how you round your spine—and notice how this affects your neck. When you roll your pelvis backwards so that you’re sitting on the back of your sitting bones, your head and chin are forced to jut forward in order to see your screen.
Now, roll your pelvis slightly forward until you notice a natural arch occurring in your spine.
And now, find the place somewhere between the two extremes where you can have a slight arch in your lower back and you feel centered on your pelvic bones. This position allows your shoulders to stack on top of your pelvis and your head to sit lightly on top of your neck. When your bones are stacked on top of one another, you won't need to use so much muscular energy to hold yourself up.
3. Allow your belly to be soft as you slightly arch your lower back and feel how much easier you can breathe when your belly is relaxed, than when you "engage your stomach muscles."
I know that conventional fitness coaching wisdom tells us that we have to "engage our abdomen to protect our lower back," but I beg to differ. Contracting your abdominal muscles might be useful when you're lifting something heavy or working out, but is not helpful or necessary during the day or for healthy sitting posture and constant contracting inhibits easy, flowing breathing.
4. Allow your arms to hang in a relaxed manner from your shoulders and bend 90 degrees at the elbow. Your wrists and forearms are resting on the desk surface. Muscular tension is not necessary in your arms, wrists and hands.