Mark and Brian from Fitness for Life and coming to you again with what we call “pewter posture,” which means computer posture. We get a lot of patients come in with neck pain and upper back pain, and we attribute it to how they sit at a computer, or at a desk, or on cell phones. Most people are sitting/standing rounded forward, their head is forward, and their shoulders are pulled forward. Add hours upon hours of this during the day, weeks, months, and their muscles start getting tired and tight.
A lot of people start developing neck pain simply because of being in these postures that are putting more stress on them. What we want to do is go over some ways to combat this. Now, what this is not is if you’re having neck pain or neck problems for some other reason, this is going to be some suggestions to help you prevent or minimize neck pain due to computer posture.
We’re going to show you some quick and easy things to do just to help you with this type of pain. The first thing we’re going to do before we get into any other movements is you just want to correct your posture. Typically the best way to do that is with a lumbar roll. When you’re sitting in your chair, you want to sit all the way back against it. You put the lumbar roll in the small of your back, so right where your belt line is, and then you lean back into that. Now what that does, is that puts you at about a 10 degree angle back, which allows your head to be in better alignment, neck and shoulders to be in better alignment, and your lower back in a neutral position.
This is a resting position for your back. Sitting upright like that, you just bend your elbows, and that’s where the keyboard should be. You bring the keyboard to you, not you go out to the keyboard. And then monitor eye level in front of you.
The other tip we have for this is every 30 minutes you should stand up. Even if you do nothing more than just stand up, elongate your spine a little bit and sit right back down. Breaking up that pattern is key in one of the first things to help you to avoid these kinds of problems.
Make sure to subscribe to our YouTube Channel, where we’re going to give you a few other tips that you can be doing. So if you have further questions, contact us at fitnessforlifept. com.