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.