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.