A health and wellness expert recently shared with me (I’ll get to your question in a bit – promise) her opinion that exercise could not undo the stresses accumulated from hours and hours of sitting. I disagree. I’ll even go one step farther and say that exercise can not only undo all or most of the stresses from sitting, it can also make sitting such an easy task that future stresses from sitting are minuscule. Simultaneously, I’ll have to admit that exercise can add to the stresses of sitting. As with most tools, it depends on how you use it. If you sit for about 14 hours a day (very likely if you’re already sitting at work) and then go to a gym and sit on machines to lift weights and sit on a bike to ‘do cardio’… well, you get the picture.

My advice to you, first and foremost, is to check that the ‘given’s are in place: a great physical fitness program that develops skills and strength in basic movements and postures. Add to this program exercises that development flexibility of the tissues on the back side of your hips (Forrest Gump’s “butt-tocks”) and also the endurance of the musculature that holds the spine erect. Then learn about how to sit well. (This approach works well for anyone who has to endure particular postures and repetitive tasks: ensure the ‘given’s are in place, then acquire the specific physical capability and bodyuse skill.)

You’ve probably seen this coming: I’m going to recommend a book. Galen Cranz’s The Chair is an easy, informative read and provides solutions to the modern day office work environment. (Note: her advice also assumes that the ‘given’s are in place.)

If you are interested in personal instruction then please contact me for a consultation.

–Jason

“Changing lumbar postures causes a migration of loads from one tissue to another… no single, idea sitting posture exists; rather, a variable posture is recommended as a strategy to minimize the risk of tissue overload.”

Later in the book he writes about a power plant in the 60′s in which operators monitored processes from a chair in a control room. Every ten minutes a buzzer went off and the operator on duty would have to get out of the chair and stand and go around a control panel making adjustments. There was no history of back troubles at this time. Some years later, the control room was updated and the operators no longer had to get up out of their chairs. As you might have guessed, low back problems began to be reported by the operators.

Laptops tend to do that to us all. Yes, The New Rules of Posture is a great book. Her older book, Balancing Your Body: A Self-Help Approach to Rolfing Movement, is good, too (though not much in it for visual learners).

- Jason

Two things make it difficult to classify a posture as “bad” or “good”:
Thing 1: the most efficient posture for one task will not be the most efficient posture for another task (or perhaps not possible at all), and
Thing 2: my ideal posture is different than yours, and yours will be different from the client I just finished working with.

I’m glad that you asked for clarification, Greg!

- Jason