Sitting At Your Desk Like This Will Help Your Back and Neck Pain

How’s it going? It’s Ekemba from SolCore Fitness again, and I’ve gotten some questions about best posture for sitting. This could be in a desk or in a car. So there are some things you can do to have good posture. I start by saying that sitting, in general, is terrible, anything stagnant on your body is not good, it wants to move around, so that’s why this big shift towards standing desks has been okay, but now you have different problems. So instead of back problems, you have foot problems. Instead of hip problems, you have circulation problems.

Your body wants to move, so get up and move around a lot. Take a walk around the block, do some jumping jacks, move your body around a little bit, break up the time in between sitting down. When you are sitting, you have three main points. First and foremost, you want to look at the top third of the screen, that way then your neck doesn’t go to too much extension or flexion and throws your posture off and throws you spine off. The other two is you want your elbows and hips approximately 90 degrees, that way you don’t have too much compression at the hip and the elbow. And you can see this is a little bad for me, but again, I want to look at the top of the screen, so I’ll sacrifice that a little bit.

Use this Exercise to Open Up Your Shoulders

While you’re sitting there, you can move too. So in this posture, everything rounds, so I can open up my shoulder girdle with what’s called a five-part shoulder. It’s a movement to generally open up the whole shoulder girdle. You start by sitting forward in your chair, getting as tall as possible, reach your arms out to the side and try and push your arms away and try and touch either wall. Staying tall as you push your arms away from your body, you lift up to the ceiling and trying touch the ceiling. You push your arms forward in front of you allowing your shoulders to come down with you, and once they’re parallel, you do a row. You keep your upper arms by your side and you stay tall, you open the doors and close the doors, and you do one arm at a time, try to point towards your opposite shoulder blade, and then you go back out to the other side. So, here’s how it looks all together. Push lift, forward, down, row, open close, one arm at a time, reach and repeat.

Do it you know five to ten times provide periodically throughout the day, and you’ll notice, there are certain parts that are difficult, so opening up or bring your arm behind you, that says to you that you have specific areas you need to stretch. So the best thing I know is myofascial stretching ELDOA to open up different chains of muscles at different joints in your spine, so you sit with a little bit more with better posture. So try that five-part shoulder and good luck to you.

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