*Disclaimer: This is an informative article, the following information should not be taken as medical advice.If you are experiencing pain/health problems, please contact your doctor or expert.
From working in a home office to cleaning, follow these simple tips given by our experts for good posture at home and watch your life improve, remember to stay active and do some stretching and the correct exercises as often as possible to keep your body limber and strong.
Getting enough movement throughout the day and maintaining proper ergonomics has been especially challenging for many people who are working remotely because of the pandemic. Following are a few strategies to help improve posture and avoid back pain, neck pain and other musculoskeletal problems:
- Find several locations for work. You might need a quiet room to work or specialized software that keeps you pinned to your desk. For everything else, identify a few places in your home where you can work, and change your body position and location throughout the day. Find ways to work while standing, walking and sitting.
- Sit in a good chair, even if it’s a wooden one, on your sit bones (also known as “sitz bones”), with a little arch in your low back. Avoid the slouch—that half-sitting, half-lying position many use to lounge on the sofa or in bed. If you want to work in bed or on the sofa, sit up on your sit bones.
- When sitting, put both feet on the floor with a right angle at your knees. Avoid crossing legs or tucking in feet. Good posture means the bones carry the weight of your body. Aligning your posture lets your bones do the work, not your muscles. This prevents muscle spasm, pain and inflammation.
- Shoulders should be dropped and relaxed, with elbows hanging down, centered at the seam line of your shirt. Don’t use the keyboard with your elbows reaching forward. This will cause isometric spasm in your neck, shoulders and arms, leading to pain and inflammation.
- Avoid forward-head position. Most people fall into the trap of forward-head position when texting, working on a laptop or doing other kinds of task work. This position tends to round the thoracic spine into what we call kyphosis, that hunchback position.
- When using a cell phone, don’t look down. Instead, rest your elbows on your chest and hold the phone at eye level.
Dr. Karen Erickson from American Chiropractic Association
What are the long-term risks of bad posture?
Stresses on the body’s internal processes, hunching over will put pressure on the abdomen area and the chest, which will lead to poor digestion. Limiting oxygen supply is also a factor in poor posture, when you open your body out, it allows your body to breathe in more effectively reaching the vital organs. Bad posture over time will lead to a misaligned spine, known as vertical subluxation. This means the spinal discs are prone to degrade, constriction to blood vessels and you’re more likely to be linked to conditions such as arthritis in different areas of the body such as the knees. Over time stress and strain to bones, joints, and ligaments is very common.
Max Swire from Back Pain Help
What are the most common posture related issues?
The most common posture related symptoms are lower back pain, neck pain, shoulder pain, hip pain, and knee pain. Posture imbalances cause these symptoms are thoracic flexion (rounding of the upper back), forward head posture, swayback (hips forward of the ankles and shoulders behind the hips), and anterior pelvic tilt (pelvis tilted down in the front). When addressing these posture imbalances to help eliminate pain and improve performance, it is important to treat the body as a unit. This means even if someone has forward head posture and neck pain, we don’t want to just focus on the head and neck but look at the rest of the body to figure out the underlying cause of the forward head posture. In this case, we will often see thoracic flexion and swayback posture. Swayback posture is usually caused by weakness in the hip and pelvic muscles and because of this weakness the hips don’t have the strength to support the spine and upper body. This causes the hips to move forward and the upper back to take over the stability work of the body.
Matt Whitehead from Oregon Exercise Therapy
What are the best practices to have a daily good posture?
Back sleep posture will help to keep the head and spine neutral, as long as the head isn’t rotated to one side. This prevents the nerves being pinched and damaged, which will affect function throughout the body. This also keeps the muscles even and prevents imbalanced tension.
Good posture exercises should support the spine and proper alignment of the body, it should strengthen the muscles needed for erect posture, especially if they are weakened by daily activities, such as sitting and slouching.Watch the videos for some good posture exercises you can perform at home. Please consult with your chiropractor or other physician before starting these good posture exercises.
Shaan from Vitality Chiropractor Centres
Whether we sit or stand we must MOVE and consider the impact of gravity on our functional physiology and the deleterious effect on our musculoskeletal system from an imbalanced posture.With the media enhanced notion of “sitting disease” and “sitting is the new smoking”, a massive trend toward standing as an alternative took place. Now many years later, the subsequent studies on standing vs sitting suggest that sitting is much easier on your body than standing but alternating throughout your workday is an ideal solution. Many academics have ventured a guess as to the ideal ratio of sitting to standing and considering how different everyone is, it is probably safest to assume a 2:1 ratio of sitting to standing. In either position, we must strive to achieve a comfortable but optimally balanced posture and listen to our bodies for signals that are telling us to move.
Patrick Harrison from CoreChair Inc.
What’s the correct sitting posture to avoid carpal tunnel?
Since Covid, most of us are spending more time in front of a computer. Poor sitting posture combined with keyboarding is a primary cause of carpal tunnel and can lead to permanent nerve damage.
Keyboarding tips
- The key preventative measure is to take the strain off your hands. Do these quick and simple stretches to safeguard your hands for life.
- Shake out your hands every 30 minutes to stimulate blood flow.
- Follow up with these super-effective finger stretches: https://www.carpalrx.com/carpal-tunnel-stretches
- Finally, lean back in your chair and squeeze your shoulder blades together.
Posture-perfect checklist
- Don’t hunch or slouch. Sit with your spine against the back of the chair, shoulders relaxed.
- Don’t “wing out” your elbows. Rest them along the sides of your body.
- Don’t over-bend your wrists. They should have a slight downward tilt on the keyboard.
- Don’t ignore your legs. Thighs and feet should be horizontal. Shins should be vertical, and feet firmly on the floor.
- Don’t bend your neck. Keep your head and chin level and neck flexible.
- Make these steps second nature to your work routine. It could prevent (and even reverse) carpal tunnel symptoms.
Dr. Zannakis from The CarpalRx
The level of discomfort, pain or other issues you experience can vary, but it’s essential to understand the repercussions of bad posture, the key to maintain a healthy and happier daily routine is to be as constant as possible.
