Frequently Asked Questions

What are the effects of sitting too long?

The effects of sitting too long include increased stress on spinal joints, decreased circulation, increased blood pressure, decreased metabolic rate leading to weight gain, poor posture, and increases in headaches, neck pain, upper back pain, and low back pain.

How does sitting impact your body?

Sitting increases the stress on your spine. It also increases the stress on the heart since healthy circulation requires regular movement. The increased spinal stress can lead to poor posture as well as headaches, neck pain, upper back pain, and low back pain.

How much sitting is too much?

Sitting for more than one hour at a time is sitting too long.

Does sitting make your butt flat?

Sitting too long can change the buttocks. It is important if you sit a lot to remember to train your gluteal muscles regularly as well as get regular exercise.

What muscles get weak from sitting?

The paraspinal muscles tend to get weak when we sit too much. These muscles help hold up our spine and maintain good posture. It is important to get regular exercise to stimulate these muscles.

Is lying down healthier than sitting?

Lying down takes the pressure off of the spine. It isn’t necessarily healthier than sitting. Too much lying down can also cause problems. The key is to move around. You can sit for some time as well as lay down for some time.

Is standing better than sitting?

Standing decreases stress on the spine. A good workstation includes a sit and stand option. Sit and stand desks are becoming very popular because it allows the person to have options. A combination of sitting and standing throughout the day is the healthiest option

What to do after sitting all day?

If you’ve been sitting all day, take a nice walk and do some stretches at the end. This circulates the blood and stimulates postural muscles. If you don’t like walking, join an exercise class. The key is to keep your body moving. This keeps your joints healthy.

Transcription

Hello, everyone. I'm Dr. Aaron Seaton with the Chiropractic Place. Today, our video is gonna be about too much sitting. A lot of people these days are sitting far too much hours and hours and hours a day, it's creating a lot of neck pain, upper back pain, low back pain, people are getting headaches because of the postural changes that happened. So, I wanted to talk about what too much sitting does to you and how it affects your spine and how chiropractic care can help you. Number one thing that happens is we see a 50% increase in the load on your spine when you sit. Think about your spine is working 50% harder when you're sitting for long periods of time. The other thing is that our joints in our spine and in our body need movement to get waste out and to get food in. So if the joints aren't moving, they're not eating, they're not getting rid of waste, and it creates a problematic environment for them, an environment where the joints don't do well. So when you sit too long, you make the spine work harder and you cut off its supply of nutrition, making you more likely to have spinal problems like neck pain, headaches, mid-back pain, upper back pain or low back pain.

The other thing is that we'd start talking to our patients about once we start getting people under care. There are a lot of these patients who sit too much, they come to us to get adjusted, they start getting relief, and then they start asking, Hey, how can I prevent this from happening? It makes sense. So one of the things we need to do is we need to address the workstation issues. If you're at a desk all the time, we need a way to get you standing up, and more important than just standing up is for a lot of people who spend hours at their computer working this way, we wanna introduce something called a wobble board or a balance board. Now, you can see this has like a half dome here on the bottom and you stand on it, and this creates a balance so that you're stimulating your brain. Most people are not aware that your brain, about 90% of the information that it dedicates its time to, is based on movement, and balance training is a great way to stimulate your brain and alert your brain and keep your spine in your joints healthy because you're moving.

So I'll kinda demo here. I know you can't see the board, but at least you can see me when I'm standing on it. So what I can do here is, I'm working at my workstation at the office, I can be doing balance training while I'm doing that. The other side benefit of doing this is not just creating a healthier spine, reducing the neck pain, the headaches, the upper back pain, the low back pain, but you're also stimulating your brain, you're gonna keep your brain more alert, you're gonna be more productive when you're doing this and that is because those balance receptors in our joints are firing off to the brain, keeping the brain healthy, keeping the brain active, 'cause when we sit all day, it's boring for our brain and we tend to get tired in the early afternoon.

Perhaps you have co-workers who start looking for that coffee in the afternoon. A lot of my people who I've put on these balance boards, they start to notice, Hey, I'm not as tired at the end of the day. And that's because your brain is more active, it's getting what it wants while you're working. So, the chiropractic care for this as well, if you have a desk job, let's look at that workstation, let's address how we can improve that, but also, if you've been sitting for a long periods of time, you need to be getting adjusted regularly from your chiropractor to keep those joints healthy, cut down on those symptoms, the neck pain, upper back pain, low back pain, headaches that are associated with sitting on a desk and working like that.

So hopefully this video was helpful. It's been helpful for several of our patients, just addressing those workstation issues and making it better. If you have any questions, give us a call at the office. I'm Dr. Aaron with the Chiropractic Place.

Call our office today to schedule an appointment to kickstart your healthy life: 530-221-8443


*The transcription is auto-generated by a program and may not be accurate. In order to ensure you get all the information from the video properly, you must watch the video.

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The Chiropractic Place
1123 Hilltop Drive
Redding CA, 96003