The Art of Sitting.
While sitting and standing (think squatting) may seem like the most rudimentary task, it’s by far the most improperly executed activity that most of us do everyday.
Don’t believe me?
Take a look at the next person beside you, or within eyesight, to sit down (I’ll go over the standing part in tomorrow’s post).
Slouched Sitting Postures: Over time can lead to injury.
I’m not just saying have a cursory look.
Rather, I’m asking you to actually observe them going through the full cycle of this basic human movement.
What do you see?
If you look carefully, you’ll see some very interesting applications of physics at work.
Gravity in all its glory will accelerate those gluteals at 9.81 meters per second squared until the firm (or plush) surface of whatever seating receptacle becomes a barrier to any further downward gravity-assisted movement of the buttocks.
And this is usually where it gets really interesting.
For those of you out there who don’t spend your days observing people and how they move, you might not notice or even care. But for the rest of us physical therapy types, this is fascinating.
This is where imprecise compensatory repetitive motions come into play.
As soon as those glutes start their heavily gravity-assisted travel towards the seat, the “plop” is almost inevitable. You know the plop I’m talking about. It’s that free-fall into the chair when muscles are turned off and gravity does all the work.
Now as soon as those glutes hit the seat and no further downward motion takes place, for most people (and especially those with low back pain) there is a subtle loss of lumbar spine stability.
What does that loss of stability look like?
Well, this loss of motor control can be seen with the posterior tilt of the pelvis (think of this as tucking your tailbone underneath yourself) coupled with the rounding of the lower back and the forward carriage of the head (see above photo for slouched spine postures and forward head/neck position).
This wouldn’t be so bad if it were corrected right away. In fact, this correction is imperative to relieve low back pain!
Ideal Sitting Posture: Easy to find, hard to hold.
However, the major issue is that once this slouched posture has been achieved, it tends to be maintained thus becoming a prolonged posture (which coincidentally is one of two components of overuse tissue trauma, the other being repetitive motions).
So how do you fix it?
In tomorrow’s post, I’ll go through a detailed breakdown of the sit (and then the return to standing) and how you can fix it using the three part approach outlined in my previous post re-capping the causes of low back pain.
Yours in movement.
Dev Chengkalath
