Becoming a Better Sitter While Working Remotely
4 Essential Steps to Improve Your Sitting Habits
It's no secret that many of us spend the majority of our waking hours sitting, primarily due to the demands of our jobs. Remote work has become the norm for many, and so have makeshift office setups. Your "office" might be your dining table, a converted spare room, a bed, a sofa…
Here are a few insights and practical tips to help you become a better sitter while you sit and work anywhere. Prolonged sitting can have adverse effects on your posture, productivity, and susceptibility to distressing musculoskeletal conditions such as lower back pain, neck pain, headaches, shoulder pain, hip pain and knee pain, so here are 4 steps to improve your day-to-day habits and become a better sitter
1: Understanding Unconscious Body Misuse
You might attempt to counteract the effects of prolonged sitting by engaging in exercise activities like yoga, pilates, group fitness classes, or personal training. Moving more itself is a start, but your well-intentioned efforts might not be addressing the root cause of these problems: unconscious body misuse.
Unconscious body misuse refers to the execution of habitual daily movements that deviate from the structural and functional design of the human body. It includes behaviors like slouching or bending down only from the waist, instead of bending the hip, knee, and ankle joints. To grasp the difference between efficient and inefficient body use, it's crucial to have a basic understanding of the human body's structural and functional design.
2: Understanding the Structural and Functional Design of the Human Body
To distinguish between healthy and unhealthy body use, let’s get familiar with the basic structural and functional relationships of the body.
The human body's structure is organized into three main regions:
the core kinetic chain (CKC)
the lower limb kinetic chain (LLKC)
upper limb kinetic chain (ULKC).
The CKC, comprising the pelvis, spine, and head, serves as the foundation of your body's structural framework. Both the LLKC (hip joints, knee joints, foot/ankle joints) and the ULKC (shoulder girdles, shoulder joints, elbow joints, wrist/hand joints) are connected to and influenced by the CKC.
Maintaining a well-balanced and dynamic CKC is essential for better sitting and overall movement. These three kinetic chains interact dynamically, meaning changes in one can affect the others. For instance, slouching while sitting, compresses your spine and can impact the function of your neck and shoulder joints, leading to discomfort, pain, and structural changes in your body for the worse.
3: Developing Body Awareness
Improving body awareness is the third key to becoming a better sitter. Often, we get into trouble because we don’t notice subtle body cues associated with poor posture and movement habits. Poor posture results from two basic issues: not moving our bodies enough and moving them in ways that deviate from their structural design.
When you develop a conscious connection to your body, you will naturally begin responding and adapting the way you interact with your environment, which will change the way you use your body to sit, stand and move throughout the day. Moving better consciously over time will reshape your sitting and movement habits into healthy ones, and can save you from accumulating pain and discomfort from unconscious body misuse. Conscious movement is medicine for your mind and body.
4: Establishing Connection and Direction
The fourth essential step to becoming a better sitter involves establishing a connection between the floor or ground and your body. This connection plays a crucial role in maintaining the vertical structural and functional organization of your body as designed, I’m talking about those 3 kinetic chains mentioned above in step 2. Sitting essentially involves the interaction between your body and the ground. The stronger and clearer this interaction, the better your sitting experience.
In modern life, two body regions form this connection with the ground throughout the day: your feet and your sitting bones via your chair's legs. Try this exercise: while sitting in your chair, press the entire surface of the bottoms of your feet into the floor. Perform this exercise while slouched and in your best upright posture. Observe how your body responds, and compare your experiences between these two sitting postures.
What's Next?
These are the four essential steps to becoming a better sitter. This article provides an overview, but I plan to delve deeper into each of these steps in separate articles. If you have any questions or feedback about the information provided here, lets talk: richard@humoma.com.
