April Newsletter: Of Course I’m an Athlete

Of course I’m an athlete! – I’m a Professional Desk Jockey

I have a confession to make.

I have a history of back pain, both upper and lower back. Sometimes I still suffer from back pain and have to actively manage it through stretching and exercises.

I first experienced chronic back pain in my late 20s. For a while I had frequent upper back pain, especially between my shoulder blades. Then in my early 30s, I started suffering from lower back pain. I discovered that frequently wearing high heels, plus having already very flexible hamstrings, and doing a lot of dancing and gymnastic activities that hyper-extended my back had all lead to me having a forward-tilted pelvis. That put continual pressure on my lower back, and my abdominal muscles weren’t reflexively engaging to stabilize me.

So I was in pain, and years of habitual posture and movements took a lot of effort to overcome.

As an active adult, and someone with a career in fitness, it is a little embarrassing to admit that I let my body get into such a dysfunctional state. It is also sometimes hard to convince people that I did in fact have bad posture and pain because of it. My parents and grandmother did not believe me when I told them. Back pain is correlated with increasing age and being overweight. Maybe my family hadn’t read that in a research article, but they seemed to know it instinctively anyway.

I’ve also had periods of ankle pain (from shoes that were ill-suited to me), and knee pain from banging up my knees. There was even one time recently when I was standing in an awkward position and I started to feel sharp hip pain for a moment. Good thing it went away as soon as I shifted position to a better stance, because I was just starting to think “oh my god, my body is falling apart!” Yes, I freak out like that.

All of this has taught me that I need to keep my muscles strong, flexible, and well-balanced in order to prevent pain and injury. I also know now that I need to always be aware of my posture and the ergonomic set-up of my work space, otherwise I will have chronic pain and limited range of motion.

I refuse to accept pain. Instead, I accept strength, posture, and muscle balance. I’d like to save you some pain too, so read on for tips to live, work, and move better (and hopefully pain-free).

Is Sitting the New Smoking?

There is a commonly cited statistic that roughly 80% of Americans will experience back pain in their life time. When you are young, it’s easy to look at that statistic and think optimistically “I’ll be in the fortunate 20%.” I thought that, and I still ended up in the 80% before age 30.

I have a feeling that statistic might soon be adjusted upward; since our technology is rapidly changing and everyone from young children to adults are spending increasing amounts of time in front of electronic screens (TV, computer, tablet, or phone).

I’m sure you see people texting like the figure below on a daily basis. It seems harmless, but having your chin tucked down to you chest and hunching over for extensive and frequent periods is very damaging to your spine.

For reference, your head weighs about as much as a bowling ball. Your neck can handle this weight well when the head is balanced over the neck, but as soon as the head starts craning forward (as in computer posture or texting posture), it puts strain on the neck equivalent to the weight of several heads. Pain and injury will result from it.

The time that you spend sitting seems like it should be harmless to your body. After all, sitting is resting position. When you are ready to exercise, you should be able to just hop right out of your chair and exercise vigorously without any aches, pains, or stiffness. But as I am sure you already know from experience, it doesn’t work out like that.

It turns out that a major risk factor for developing back pain is having long periods of inactivity punctuated by brief periods of strenuous activity. Are you kidding?! That describes almost every active person I know, because we spend probably 8+ hours sitting in a typical day, then jump up after work to do some intense metabolic conditioning with kettlebells.

So our bodies get angry at us for spending most of our waking hours in a chair that is unsupportive, then putting ourselves through brief periods of extra mechanical stress on our joints.

If our bodies don’t like hours of uninterrupted inactivity, then it seems like almost a waste of time to get up and stretch for a few seconds every hour. Surely, that is such a small portion of time that it will have a negligible effect on the body. It seems like it would be more efficient to just add up all those 1-minute breaks into one longer session. Then you could at least get some real exercise in.

Yet when it comes to avoiding chronic pain, once again that is not how it works out in real life. It turns out that frequency of physical activity has a huge impact on your overall posture and mobility. Your body needs that frequent reset of proper posture and moving joints through their range of motion. So I encourage you to set an hourly alarm on your phone to remind yourself to get up and stretch for 30 seconds or more. It may not feel like much at first, but it will start to give you momentum and a greater feeling of energy.

During your work day, it is easy to feel like you can just hunch forward for a few minutes while you work out this one urgent problem or issue, but trust me – pain is not worth it. Take a minute to make sure your chair is at the correct height (feet flat on ground), monitor is at arm’s length from you, and keyboard is low and close enough so that your elbows are right below your shoulders and wrists straight. Your neck and back will feel so much better.