Who taught you how to sit? I’m guessing nobody, you probably just figured out how to do it by trial and error when you were a baby. You learned how to stay upright and eventually not fall over while resting on your butt; that was a major milestone when you were 8 months old, but you haven’t been given much credit for it later in life, have you? Unfortunately, it’s later in life that you are going to need to be good at it, because chances are you are going to be spending multiple hours a day staring at a computer screen. It is time you learned how to sit properly.
*Movements and postures demonstrated well in the video at the end of this post
Our bodies are built to deal with the vertical load of gravity, but at the same time are inherently lazy when it comes to holding everything up properly. We have a tendency to get engrossed in what is visually in front of us with little regard to how we have positioned our bodies to allow our eyes to see what we want to see. Your brain has a head righting reflex that tries to keep your head looking straight forward in the easiest way possible; unfortunately this usually comes at the expense of your neck and back.
The goal of sitting properly is to effectively vertically stack your torso and head on top of your pelvis and hips in a nice gentle S-curve. The odds of you doing this properly are stacked against you for a few reasons. First, most people have one, two or three of the following: forward head posture, an overly braced lower torso, and/or really flexible or really stiff hips. Second, most chairs are not designed very ergonomically and promote slouching more than support. Read More