Why Not Use Your Work Hours to Improve Your Posture?
Few things say as much about you as your posture. The way you carry yourself, how tall you stand, whether your heart and chest area is open and confident or crouched over and closed says a lot about your self-confidence, energy level, and approach to life.
Good posture is not just a cosmetic factor, however. Bad posture has been found to lie at the root of numerous physical aliments. Forward head posture, which in its early stages shows up as rounded shoulders and a head that moves forward of the body’s midline, leads to numerous problems, particularly as we get older. In addition, bad posture is a major factor in the development of back pain.
How does bad posture develop and what can you do to improve it? A major factor for anyone who works long hours at a desk is our desk posture, i.e. how we sit throughout the day. The body is constantly adapting to the influences we subject it to. If you sit for eight long hours at your desk, five days a week, guess what? Whichever shape you put your body in the desk posture you assume will begin to make a permanent imprint on your body. If you sit with your shoulders rounded and head forward staring at the computer screen, what is your body going to look like when you get up? If you’ve ever found it hard to straighten up when you get up from your desk, there you have the reason why.
On the other hand, if you sit upright with a straight back and open heart, that will help reshape your posture over time. If possible, try doing some corrective posture exercises at your desk throughout the day. This will help you strengthen your core muscles for a more permanent correction of bad posture.
To change your desk posture permanently, also look for a chair that offers posture back support. Most chairs used in the work place don’t offer the back support needed and may even encourage you to slump back in the chair with a rounded lower back. This is a formula not just for developiong bad posture, but also serious back problems down the road, including painful disc conditions. Spend some time during the day sitting with the proper posture support in the back and some time doing active sitting, training your core muscles without using any back support.
Learning to sit correctly takes time and patience. Your core muscles need to get stronger, and you need to train your body to adapt a better desk posture over time. But the improvements you’ll notice in your health and energy are well worth it.
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