Seating on the floor, the new mobility movement.

Working in the office is a hard task for the body, and in the last few years, something made this task even worst.

Covid-19 forced millions of people worldwide to work from home.

As per consequence, many people reduce their daily movement activity and start increasing the stress response to work and daily life.

But what does covid-19 have to do with seating on the floor, you may ask yourself?

Well, for convenience, and other rules, such as hygiene too, we nowadays spend most of our time seating on chairs.

At least within Western cultural settings.

But as we all know, in the east side of the world, floor seating is actually an ancient practice.

In our collective mind, we all can refer to Asian people squatting anywhere they can, and with not much problem.

Where for us, in the west, squatting is associated with going to the gym, training, and being sporty.

It is funny, isn’t it?!

So, that’s where covid-19 is linked to seating on the floor.

Due to the covid pandemic, many people start working from home.

But the home ergonomics for office work is not the same that the one in the office.

In addition to this, we have to add that as big and comfortable a chair can be, it is always a chair, indeed the chair is a silent killer.

Seating on a chair does limit our ability to move around, as discomfort arises, while seating.

Think now about seating on the floor and standing back up.

For the average adult, doing this task is not a comfortable thing.

Why so?

Well, because we are not used to it.

All this year seated on a chair, did reduce our body adaptability to the ground seating.

Seating on a chair for long hours would:

• stiff up the hips, which are in constant flexion
• increase pressure on the Lumbar back
• arch the thoracic area, with an increase in kyphosis.

In fact, a muscle within in 20 minutes of no movement, would adapt to the shape it is seating into.

On the other hand, as the muscle starts losing its neuroplasticity, the joints controlled by those muscles would start stiffening up too.

This is so, a domino effect that would brake the equilibrium along the stability/mobility joints chain.

How to prevent this?

Well, seating on the floor, is definitely a good start.

Seating on the floor come’s with the benefits of more mobility options.

As we may feel uncomfortable with the seating position, once on the floor, changing position would be a spontaneous and comfortable act to do.

But as we are so used to seat on chairs, starting seating on the floor for 8 hours a day, can be challenging.

So, rather than a seat on a chair all day, is good to switch between floor seating, chair and standing up initially.

This process would allow the body to slowly break the bad habit of rounding onto the desk from the stiff chair seating.

Also because the body is not designed to either seat on a chair or stand up for such a long time for so many days.

So the habit of changing position would definitely improve mobility and with it, many other things would come down to and ease.

In conclusion, to improve the Upper Cross Syndrome (UCS) presentation of someone who spends long hours seating at a desk, the steps to take are:

• reduce the symptoms of pain and discomfort in the Cx area
• start losing the thoracic area
• Improving hip mobility allows the person to spend more time on the floor.

Within the thoracic area, the work that needs to be done is to lose the vertebrae, by doing some mobs and reducing tension on the lat dorsi muscle.

In the next post we would look into:

• How to seat on the floor and how to stand back up
  
• Exercises that can help to improve the floor seating time.
• Seating at the desk trick posture