From the day we leave the hospital when we’re born we are placed in chairs. Carseats, booster seats, couches, dining chairs, benches or pews, school desks and seats on the bus, train or car. We’re asked all the time to ‘take a seat’ and offering someone a seat is seen as polite. As active youngsters we are scolded if we don’t sit still in our seats throughout the school day. But it’s only the last couple hundred years that chairs have been a fixture in our lives.
Our bodies weren’t meant to stay in a seated position for the majority of our day. In fact, our bodies are designed to walk, run, lift, push, pull and squat most of the day.
Even a few generations ago we were more active despite having modern conveniences. There was a time when office workers walked from the suburbs to their office jobs. We washed clothes with our own power, carried water in from a well, cooked from scratch without small appliances, grew food in a garden and got up to change the channel on the TV. That’s a heck of a lot of moving on a daily basis that has almost entirely disappeared. Nowadays we actually have to seek out exercise to keep ourselves healthy.
One striking change is how people doing vastly different kinds of work can be doing it by using their bodies in the same sedentary positions. The executive board and the college student are both spending their working hours seated in a chair with a table in front of them. When else in history would such diverse job descriptions require the same movements and positions all day?
Our most common aches and pains have a lot to do with our choices of how we spend our time. Low back pain, ‘sleepy glutes’, neck pain, the list goes on and on. It’s no wonder these are bothering us, we are all chair shaped! It surprises me how people view sitting as the default position for spending our time and how a walk at lunch time or standing up to stretch our legs every hour or so are seen as treats. Well, how about we flip that on its head? Why don’t we see standing and walking as the norm and sitting down as a treat? What if we spend most of our waking hours standing, walking, squatting, moving in some way? What if we took a seat ONLY when our legs, feet and back get tired?
Sitting on our bums all day we lose the range of motion we’re supposed to have not just in our hips but in practically our entire bodies. We spent countless hours training our muscle tone to hold a seated position and get almost no opportunity to experience the opposite movements let alone any movements in rotation or side bending. It’s not wonder our bodies are having a hard time getting us around without pain.
A sit-stand desk is an ideal way of getting off your bum but also introducing movement into your day. It gives us ample opportunity to move in all directions and fire muscles other than our chair-shaped ones. I stand while I write and read. I spend that time not just standing still but rotating my torso, shifting from one foot to the other, rotating my hips, side bending my torso, taking occasional deep breaths. I sit only when my legs, feet and back get tired. I will start baking my own bread and cooking more from scratch, I walk when the distance is under a 45 minute walk, I squat instead of sit when I’m reading. There’s no excuse that you don’t have time to move. If you make a few shifts in how you spend your time you can move all day long.