Sitting straight 'bad for backs' (2008) | Hacker News Reader

Sitting straight 'bad for backs' (2008)

news.bbc.co.uk

48 pointslinux_devil32 comments

This is such bullshit. The problem with all forms of sitting for long periods is that (without corrective exercise) your spinal muscles waste away.

This is where the pain comes from - your spine is not supporting itself any more and the discs become compressed and misaligned and the muscles more easily strained.

In this context, sitting in a more relaxed position where "less strain is placed on the spinal disks and associated muscles and tendons" might temporarily avoid some of the pain from strained muscles but is going to make the problem worse in the long run.

To get away from this cycle of back pain you need to do one thing: targeted exercise to build up the atrophied muscles.

Personally I have found that a more 'active' (i.e. straight upright) sitting position also helps, now that my back is fit enough to cope with this.

'Ergonomic' office chairs like the Herman Miller seem to make the problem worse for me, I believe because they are all designed with the misguided notion that they should support your back for you.

It is well known that bones, joints and muscles all need loading and working in order to stay healthy (for example: http://www.webmd.com/osteoporosis/guide/osteoporosis-exercis...)

If any of you are suffering from back problems and are lucky enough to live in Europe near one of these gyms http://www.kieser-training.com I highly recommend them (there are others with similar programme) ...I'm not associated in any way but they have made a massive improvement to my life.

The suggestion that 'strain' on 'muscles and tendons' is bad for your back is a dangerous one IMHO ...yes this is why you have pain right now, but the answer is to strengthen the back so the muscles can cope, not to use the muscles even less!

I absolutely agree.

I've been working at a desk for about nine months now and I am dying of back pain. Out of all the various back exercises one can find on the Internet, which ones would you recommend for starters?

Try the simple back bridge progressions in the "convict conditioning" book. Dumb name, but a solid approach to exercising without a fun and a great section on back exercises.

My spine has become crooked since I stopped lifting for a while, it's actually quite pathetic. The only thing that sorts it out and relieves the pain is core and lower back exercises. Fortunately these are the most accessible exercises: you don't need machines or weights. One thing I like to do is go to the gym and dangle from the tall pull-up bars, completely relax my muscles and let my spine decompress and hang. Then, I do a rowing/pedaling motion with my legs while I dangle, as well as do high kicks. I have to keep doing it, though, if I don't go every alternating day my back will be crooked and painful once again.

I do the same thing (hang from the pull-up bars). It seems to sort things out, but I get light-headed nearly every time.

I walk a lot to and from work (choose further stations if neccessary) and I carry a backpack that has a laptop and one or two heavy books so that my body muscles have some balancing work to do. It works. I only had back pain once when I rented a furnished apartment with soft comfy furniture. Once I realized that the furniture was bad, I added some pillows to give lumbar support, and spent a few days standing to watch TV.

Of course I sleep on a thin futon and mostly sit on wooden chairs or directors chairs. But I do think the walking is essential to building up muscle strength to begin with. Unless you want to lift free weights...

The problem is people are in the habit of slouching forward, pulling on the muscles at the front. In order to "sit straight", they will likely tense the opposite muscles and pull both front and back muscles at the same time, making the problem worse.

Far better is to reeducate yourself how to release the forward pulling muscles. This however is no easy task. Thommas Hanna has a good book about this with very interesting exercises to practice.

http://www.amazon.com/Somatics-Reawakening-Control-Movement-...

The Alexander Technique is another discipline that teaches you how to re-educate your mind / body control.

Watch professional dancers, how they appear to be both straight and relaxed and fluid with their movements. Not stiff and rigid. Also people who practice Yoga are both flexible, yet have better than average posture.

I've always wondered how dancers do it, even though I'm athletic and more flexible than the average person (hypermobile in some joints actually). So that sounds like potentially useful reading. I've been standing at work for a few years, full time since I got an Ergotron Workfit a couple of years ago. It probably would be healthier to go for a balance of sitting and standing, but I think I do tend to be a little too rigid when sitting up. Additionally, I'm not much more than five feet tall and it seems like chairs and desks just aren't designed for people of that sort of stature. Even ones that are otherwise relatively ergonomic.

I wish it were easier to find a healthy balance without having to treat oneself as a longitudinal case study.

Hip angle is not the issue, or at least, it's a secondary concern. The main concern is spinal flexion. You want to be sitting with a neutral spine, regardless of hip angle. You'll start to get issues like bulging discs and strained muscles if your lumbar spine is in flexion for long periods of time.

Problem is, most sedentary people, especially men, do not know and cannot feel the difference between hip flexion and lumbar spinal flexion. When you ask them to touch their toes, they keep their hips mostly extended and flex their spine instead. Very bad.

Strength training (particularly powerlifts like weighted squats and deadlifts with proper form, as well as assistance movements like back extensions and good-mornings) can help strengthen the muscles of the lower back, making it much easier to keep your lumbar spine neutral while sitting.

"Problem is, most sedentary people, especially men, do not know and cannot feel the difference between hip flexion and lumbar spinal flexion. When you ask them to touch their toes, they keep their hips mostly extended and flex their spine instead. Very bad."

Agreed. This is something I didn't know I was doing until I started doing Yoga regularly -- after a while, you become very aware of the weakness of your back muscles, the tension of your hamstrings (if you're the typical male), and how the overall tendency is to tip your pelvis backward while seated, which makes your spine bulge to the rear. And when you're standing, you tend to tip your pelvis the other way (due to weak abs), leading to the "beer gut" phenomenon, and impinging the lower back. It's no wonder that people have back trouble as they get older!

For men especially, Yoga focuses on stretching the hamstrings, straightening/strengthening the back, and increasing range of motion in the hips and legs. I highly recommend it -- if you keep at it, it really helps reduce pain in the lower back (plus, you get addicted to the stretching).

The thing you should be doing is not sitting at all, at least not for hours at a time.

I'm not sure why you were downvoted - I thought it's pretty well-accepted that prolonged sitting is bad for you.

It's also fairly well accepted that prolonged standing is bad for you.

In case anyone is curious, an explanation of this from Cornell ergonomics researchers: http://ergo.human.cornell.edu/CUESitStand.html

Not a big concern, few people who make an effort to use a standing desk are going to end up standing for too long, as they will take breaks (get a stool). It's far more likely the average person will sit too long since the symptoms of excessive sitting only appear later on; the actual time of sitting will feel comfortable and people go 9 hours a day without taking a break.

Few people are in a job where they can't walk around the office every hour or so. Go get some green tea from the coffee room, stand at a window in an empty meeting room and stare into the distance thinking about a better way to solve the problem you are working on. Your physical health will be much better, and your work quality will improve too.

Banging away in long coding sessions is a good way to create tons of subtle bugs that are hard to find because you did too much coding before running all tests and having a code review.

I switched to a yoga ball a few years back and my lower back pain went away completely. While sitting in general might not be ideal for long periods of time, at least with a yoga ball my back is forced to support itself, is constantly moving/adjusting and I get the adult equivalent of a bouncy chair at my desk.

For me personally it's been a great success, but I have yet to see any conclusive "yoga balls are better than chairs" articles that didn't read like new age dribble.

That's a problem I find with a lot of these activities. There is some good stuff, mixed in with a lot of mystical / new age bullshit.

They've only tried 3 positions (<90 deg, 90 deg and 135 deg), and in any case they aren't working with an explanatory theory, so how on earth are they entitled to claim that 135 deg is optimal?

However I believe the optimal position is slightly reclined, for two reasons: (1) only then is there enough passive friction between the chair's back and the sitter's back to provide lateral support, (2) our spines evolved while we were walking and running around in Africa, looking mostly not at the horizon but at the ground several metres ahead, checking for snakes, pitfalls, stones, etc). thus our most natural viewing angle is less than 90 deg wrt to the spine

Advice from someone who has been studying spine biomechanics for a while: http://www.humankinetics.com/excerpts/excerpts/strategies-to...

I'm always putting my feet up so I'm more lying than sitting. I'm probably screwed anyway. I'm way overweight so worrying about my seating or standing position is like worrying about which orientation my deck chairs are facing. Standing vs sitting is for the ultra-healthy.

If you are fat, you have one extra reason to be carefull about your body positioning, any strain created by bad posture increases with weight.

You look at these standing desk types, they're usually skinny and already healthy. Standing for long hours when you're overweight is not a reasonable, nor probably healthy suggestion.

Well, you should not seat for long periods of time.

If you do you train your body, the same way that if you look just with one eye you modify the eye you don't use, you modify your spine if you seat or use heels for long periods of time.

A good chiropractic professional could read your body in an amazing way.

Once you have modified your body by use, being "comfortable" is not the same as "healthy". Smoking is comfortable for a smoker, taking drugs is comfortable for a drug addict and covering one eye is more comfortable than using it once you have used only the other for a long time.

There is no evidence that chiropractic treatments are any more effective for treating back pain than other manual treatments (e.g. massage). And it comes with much higher risks. There is no evidence it does any good for anything elsewhere on the body.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chiropractic#Effectiveness

Is there any type of sitting that isn't bad for backs?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Riding-like_sitting might be. I personally use a saddle chair at work these days, although there are fewer serious studies done on the subject than I'd like. One of the evident benefits of sitting higher is that it's less effort to stand up, walk around, and also work standing up (if you have an easily adjustable desk).

I switch back and forth with a chaise lounge in my (luckily, home) office. I'm getting a sit/stand desk, so I'm hoping that the three positions should enable lots of healthful motion (lying/reclining, sitting, standing).

Has anyone ever figured out how to type at a 135 degree angle? It always seems to put too much pressure on my wrists and shoulders, and I return to slumping.

Get one of those adjustable keyboard trays that allow you to control the angle of the keyboard.

This is exactly how I have been sitting this week, on a sofa actually, since my chair was getting too uncomfortable, and now my neck feels alarmingly stiff.

I'm pretty sure it's the sofa, not the posture.

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