To keep you upright while sitting, your body relies on an engaged core. Your abdominal muscles work with your back muscles to keep you centered and balanced, to keep your arms working and your head on straight. In short, sitting can be a low impact activity. But man, keeping your muscles constantly engaged means you don\u2019t relax, and isn\u2019t relaxation the reason chairs were invented in the first place? The problem is that few of the chairs, seats, couches, and stools that exist today support the body\u2019s natural (and optimum) seated posture. Modern sitting, so to speak, has transformed the natural shape of our back, and we\u2019re worse off for it. <\/span><\/p>\n Most Americans <\/span><\/a>suffer from back pain. It affects our day-to-day life, our sleep and of course our happiness. But what if our pain, and degenerative effects of aging on our spine, could be virtually eliminated\u2014or completely prevented?<\/span><\/p>\n It may be that the cause of back pain for many of us is the shape of our spine, or rather, the shape we have trained our spines to become. Most Americans today have an \u201cS\u201d shaped spine. There\u2019s a curve at the neck\/shoulders, then an opposite curve at the lower back\/buttocks. Naturally, though, the spine should be a \u201cJ\u201d shape so that the lower back is the only curve. You\u2019ll find this in kids and, perhaps most tellingly, in traditional cultures. <\/span><\/p>\n Esther Gokhale is a Princeton-trained biochemist who, after suffering two herniated discs in two years, set out to find a way to fix her back. Drawing on research and her own observations of traditional cultures all over the world, she developed a method <\/a><\/span>to successfully fix her spine and the spines of many other suffering Americans. <\/span><\/p>\n In her travels, she found that older people didn\u2019t have much degeneration or pain in their backs and that women, even after spending full days bent over their work, didn\u2019t have back pain. Gokhale observed that their posture is different because their spines don\u2019t have the extra curve that most of ours do and it\u2019s because of the differences in posture. There\u2019s been little formal research studying spine shapes and associated pain, but the anecdotal evidence is compelling.\u00a0<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n Not only that, but there\u2019s been quite a bit of research done on the deleterious effects of sitting the way we do\u2014shoulders forward, spine in the shape of an S\u2014and it\u2019s pretty clear that painful or not: the way we sit is hazardous to our health. <\/span><\/p>\n Sitting in chairs with shoulders forward, core relaxed, spine compressed, results in aches and pains that aren\u2019t just limited to the back. And, as the years wear on, minor pains turn into major issues. Extended sitting is linked to a higher likelihood of osteoporosis, and serious conditions like varicose veins, deep vein thrombosis, even cancer, heart disease, and death. <\/a><\/span>Those who spent more than four hours a day sitting increased their risk of death from any cause by 50% and their risk of cardiovascular disease-related events by 125%. \u00a0<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n Most people spend their workdays confined to chairs, but that doesn\u2019t mean you have to settle for a life of pain and disease. Move as much as you can and when you can\u2019t, practice sitting better [link to the right way to sit]. Doing so will strengthen and tone your core, and maybe even help the workday pass faster. It\u2019s good exercise to practice squeezing your shoulder blades together and breathing into your abdomen \u00a0When you do feel pain, don\u2019t hesitate to seek treatment from a chiropractor. <\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Chairs may be Changing the Shape of Your Back To keep you upright while sitting, your body relies on an engaged core. Your abdominal muscles work with your back muscles to keep you centered and balanced, to keep your arms […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":24,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1125],"tags":[],"acf":[],"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/best-chiropractors.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16904"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/best-chiropractors.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/best-chiropractors.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/best-chiropractors.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/24"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/best-chiropractors.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=16904"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/best-chiropractors.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16904\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/best-chiropractors.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16904"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/best-chiropractors.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16904"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/best-chiropractors.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16904"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}The \u201cS\u201d is for \u201c(Stop) Slouching\u201d<\/b><\/h2>\n
Practice, Practice, Practice<\/b><\/h2>\n