As previously spoken in another blog post, seating on the floor, and working at the pc would be a better anatomical position than seating on a chair.
Why?
Well, seating on a chair, is not actually that comfortable, especially in the long term.
As a massage therapist, most of my clients are people who have cervical pain or suffer from headaches.
In fact, seating at a desk for so many hours does more damage than you may realise.
So, let’s start with the lower body portion.
Staying seated on a chair does direct pressure on the hamstring.
The hamstrings are the group of muscles located on the posterior portion of your tight.
In doing so, the hamstring would get often numbed and lose power.
On the other hand, beneath the hamstring, we have the sciatica nerve, which is the main nerve of the lower body portion.
This nerve can easily get compressed at the piriformis, which is a muscle that runs beneath the Gluteus Max and connect the medial portion of the sacrum to the greater trochanter.
So, seating on a chair would already create a good degree of entrampment for the hamstring and sciatic nerve.
Moving upwards, even the gluteus muscle, like the gluteus max, med and min gets trapped in constant pressure.
The deactivation of those muscles would then manifest itself when we try to walk or in any case extend the leg.
As previously seen in the “firing pattern” blog post, the hamstring and gluteus max play a crucial role in leg extension and help in preventing lower back pain.
Now, this is what happens to the muscle part of the lower body portion.
But is not the only issue that the body has to face with so many hours seating on a chair.
There is more.
What happens in fact, is that the joints themself get stiffed up.
The mobility joints like the Hip and Thoracic get really stiff and stability joints like the Lumbar area get overloaded, due to the gravity force being accumulated in the lower back area.
And this of the joints stiffness and overloading is a really big problem in the long term.
Indeed, when a mobility joint gets stiff, the stability joint above and below would try to compensate.
So, that’s where the cervical issues start.
As the thoracic stiff up, the lower cervical portion of the vertebrae, which is a stability joint, would try to compensate and in the long term would cause neck pain, shoulder pain and headaches.
So how seating on the floor can improve mobility?
Well, seating on the floor, would initially feel hard, if you don’t have much mobility. But that’s all the point, right?
Slowly, your mobility would start improving.
This would happen because, after a few minutes your body feels uncomfortable in a position, and it would move.
That movement is your body doing exercises.
That movement is your body’s way of improving its own posture.
So, in order to reduce the chance of lower back pain, neck pain, and shoulder pain, you better get into the habit of moving the body more often.
The thing that doesn’t happen on a chair.