WSJ: Bad Sitting Posture at Work Leads to Bad Standing Posture All the Time
Good posture is so critical for mood and spine health. When you collapse your chest and neck, you also compress your lungs causing shallow breathing – it becomes a habit, as does the curved alignment of your spine. Add 40 years and you’ll face spinal issues for the rest of your life. So sit up straight and start yoga and/or tai chi / aikido, and maybe even Alexander or feldenkrais posture training. I did and it made an amazing difference. My chiro says my spine is better now than 10 years ago.
WSJ:
Looks like your mother was right when she told you to sit up straight.
There’s growing evidence that good posture contributes to a range of health benefits, from reducing back and joint pain to boosting mood. Health-care practitioners from physical therapists to surgeons to psychologists increasingly take posture into account when evaluating patients, and offer tips and tools for improvement.
Good posture doesn’t just mean standing with the shoulders thrown back. More important is maintaining good alignment, with ears over the shoulders, shoulders over hips, and hips over the knees and ankles. Body weight should be distributed evenly between the feet.
Seated posture, especially while using a computer, is critically important and deserves more attention, experts say, in part because it can affect a person’s posture while standing and walking. Experts say it is essential to think about posture while walking, getting up out of a chair or using a cellphone or tablet.
The hunched-over position of the typical electronic-device user is of particular concern, and is sparking new back- and neck-pain problems in teenagers. A study of 6,000 Finnish adolescents found frequent use of computers, mobile phones, videogame players and television was associated with greater rates of neck and lower-back pain, according to a 2006 paper in the European Journal of Public Health.
Posture is “probably the 800-pound gorilla when it comes to health and wellness,” says Allston Stubbs, an orthopedic surgeon at Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center, inWinston-Salem, N.C., who treats patients with back or joint pain. “We see the spine and overall skeletal structure being critical to a patient’s functionality and their satisfaction with their life and health care.”
click upper left link for the full article – and SIT UP STRAIGHT! 🙂
Chez Froggie 