Does Sitting Cause Back Pain?
I can answer this one anecdotally thanks to the large sample size of clients we have had through our doors that work office jobs and have severe upper back and shoulder, as well as a dull ache below their shoulder blade.
It is extremely rare, and brief if ever, that I have taught somebody how to sit properly. It is rare that while training someone, they will magically get another job that doesn’t involve sitting. And yet, I have helped SO many office workers break the cycle of pain after a long day of sitting at a computer and focusing.
So, these clients are still sitting, and they have not been taught to sit any different, but now they are out of pain… so what helped their back pain?
WHY DOES BACK PAIN START
When a client comes in, we take their gait analysis. This is slow motion footage of them running from the 4 different angles (front, sides, back). We use this gait footage to ascertain exactly what is going on in their body. There is a great saying ‘function decides form.’ This means that the form of your muscles and bone structure, the things that can cause a lot of pain, result from the way you USE these muscles and structures.
Say for instance, whenever you walk/run/move, your right hip dumps down. When you take a step, your hips are supposed to rotate, but this doesn’t occur for many people, so their hips will shift from side to side or drop up and down as a results. So in this case, if your right hip were to be dropping down a few centimeters with every step, you would be stretching the muscles above the hip CONSTANTLY.
This constant stretching of the lower back muscles on the side your hip drops would weaken those muscles ability to contract ( or create contractile potential to be exact.) This would do two major things:
It would reduce the stability of the muscles supporting your shoulder, head, neck, upper back.
It would cause hyper-flaccid tissue that cannot hold water and therefore would constantly feel tight and painful. The structures surrounding the over-stretched muscles would also tighten further to compensate, this also causes pain.
So hopefully you can now see how sitting is not the major problem. The way you’re moving is. If your body moves impeccably ,your structure will be solid and robust, and could handle long-periods of an otherwise quite restorative position such as sitting.
HOW DO YOU CORRECT THESE ASYMMETRIES THAT CAUSE BACK PAIN?
If you’ve been following along, I bet you can guess that the way to correct the back pain would to correct the movement pattern that is affecting the form and therefore affecting the pain.
In the example above, you would need to correct the hip drop on the right side every time the person were to take a step.
There are many, many movement patterns and structures involved in getting a leg to take a step and having the hips rotate correctly.
The main structures in most movements are the glutes, core and thoracic spine (upper part of the back). In the case of the office worker, the glutes are always stretched in a seated position and the core is always slightly shortened in the seated position. These two major muscles lack correct use and the stretching/contracting they need to function optimally when you eventually stand up.
In this case, the last structure standing would be the thoracic spine, which literally has to hold up the weight of the weakened glutes and the core.
So, in this case, I likely would not jump straight into strengthening or stretching the upper back. Rather, I would aim to get the glutes and the core functioning correctly while standing and moving about.
So, in this case, the sitting actually did have a lot to do with the onset of the hypothetical clients back pain!