So they say that sitting too much shortens your life and all that. They also say that most of us sit incorrectly. I know I do. I constantly slide my butt forward and slouch. And I was thinking, what I need is a seat belt to keep me from sliding forward. But such a thing doesn’t seem to exist. There must be some problem with them that I am missing. Since Lemmy has lots of desk jockeys, I figured I would ask here.
Because unlike in cars there isn’t much chair accidents? ;)
More seriously, no seat belt can help you sit correctly in a chair. What can help you, easily and cheaply, is sitting less. Regularly make breaks and get up, move do stuff that you can do standing up. This one is not cheap but using one of those sit/stand desks can help in that regard — I consider mine the second best health spending I ever made, the first one being: good walking shoes (another great habit for one’s health is to walk as much and as regularly as one can).
I actually have a sit stand desk. And do use it some. But I have some issues with my hips and SI joints. Standing without walking gets painful pretty fast.
It can sure get painful quickly. A few things worth considering:
For me (50+ dude that was in really poor shape and health when I started), what matters is to regularly get my ass out of that chair for 10 or 15 minutes, sometimes more but as long as I have my 10 minutes I’m happy. Be it to stand at the desk or to do stuff around the office/home. It’s the regularity, making it into a habit, that I find the most helpful. At the beginning I used a timer to remind myself to stand up and, yep, it was a pain to get constantly interrupted by that stupid alarm but since it seemed to help my back (edit: and knee and feet) a little I kept on using it up until the day I realized I needed it no more. I don’t think about it, I just regularly move my ass out of that chair — ad I use one of those mats I mentioned.
I don’t know about your specific situation so this may not apply at all, but getting back into walking also helped me immensely (as does help wearing good shoes: the day I switched to better walking shoes my endurance skyrocketed). That and healthier eating habits were key in me getting back into some kind of shape and health despite starting real low: I barely could walk at all.
Not exaggerating, I celebrated like if I was Armstrong stepping on the Moon, the first time I managed to walk down and back our street without being exhausted and without my joints, back and feet hurting so much for the next few days that I had to lay down (it was that bad). Nowadays, I walk up to 10 km daily, never less than 6. Sure, I’m no athlete and my health issues won’t go away ever but what matters is that most of my chronicle pains have vanished almost entirely, even the most enduring ones that plagued me for… decades. And I can move around and use my body almost normally. I also lost a hefty chunk of fat, which is a neat bonus ;)
Sorry for that too long reply to your comment. It’s just something I consider so worth talking about ;)
Yeah, I have the mat. And walking is fine. I can walk pretty far with no issues. Standing still is painful though. And I know it is weak core muscles. But the exercises to strengthen them cause the si joints to hurt 24/7. My pt struggled to find stuff to help. And I do those, but they just don’t seem to be enough. As for working up to longer and longer standing times, I have adhd, and such things are near impossible, I’ve tried. So I need more like physical reminders that can’t be ignored. Like belt… could put spikey stuff on it so when I slide forward I will feel it and be inclined to slide back. That is where I was going with this.
Those mats are called anti-fatigue mats in English. OP definitely needs one of these if they don’t already have one.
Thx for the clarification.
My advice would be to go to a rolfer and tell them about these issues.
Invest in a treadmill. /s
I actually have one and tried. But it is too hard to type while walking.