I found sitting posture and ergonomics always weird. I was always thinking that nobody can sit like that for a long time.
I think the most recent recommendations are to swap your seating position every now and again to not keep load on any single part for too long and to take frequent breaks to walk around.
“The best posture is your next posture”, keep it moving people!
This is a neat way of putting it, thanks!
Yep, there’s not really any animal that “sits” for a long amount of time.
You’re either up and moving around, sitting for maybe five minutes, or just full on flopped on the ground.
Sitting for 8 hours while being physically inactive but still alert just isn’t natural for really any living thing. Even ambush predators are laying down while they wait.
That’s what great about work from home.
I bounce between laying on a couch, sitting in a comfy chair, an ergonomic office chair at a desk, or standing at a counter.
If I did any of those things for 8 hrs straight, my back would be killing me.
I take it you’ve never seen lions. Or pandas.
Lion’s sitting is not like our sitting, and … Pandas? Evolutionary dead-end.
I’ve always thought lumbar support pillows are the most uncomfortable, dumb thing to put in your chair and I have no idea how people sit with those for any length of time.
I swear those things have hurt me so much, I have no idea either. There was one that came with a used expensive chair I bought. I thought I was sitting in it wrong or something because I felt like I had severe back pains after just a few days.
Ok I agree but there’s a caveat. If you’ve got a gaming setup or other situation where you want your chair to lean back (usually a knob an office chair has), then the lumbar pillow is great for gaming/theater mode
I definitely also think moving around is the way to go, but in regards to feeling uncomfortable when sitting straight, it helped me to do stretches.
I’m guessing, if you’re always kind of ‘curled’ up, the sinews and muscles and such at the front of your body contract. So, if you then go into the straight position once in a blue moon, everything at the front of your body has to be stretched further than it usually would be, which is uncomfortable.
Well, and if you give it the ol’ morning stretch, those sinews and such will be stretched beyond the normal straight sitting position, so that the normal straight sitting position is within the comfortable range…
I used to think and feel the same. That changed when mid pandemic I decided to invest in a good chair, Herman miller embody. It taught me how to sit properly, so much so that even when there’s no back rest I sit with my back straight and people on occasion asked me how I do it 😁
Okay, hear me out… I had bad posture all my life. Lots of reasons. I had a really heavy school bag and blame the whole educational system for this shit. Also, my parents never really cared, and most attempts by my mom to make me “stand up straight” were done in a rebuking fashion and I was never responsive.
Fast forward, I’m a grown-up, now with apparent Anterior Pelvic Tilt. For those who don’t know what that means, it’s when your posture becomes this:
I started off by doing APT exercises to help reduce my pelvic tilt, and that was fine… but as soon as I attempted to “stand properly”, I hit that wall of “this doesn’t feel right”. I could only do it consciously, and often “caught myself” slouching or sticking my butt out, only to try to correct the posture again and again and again.
Anyway, in the end, it worked. I was able to see the results of my APT fading after a few months of doing exercises specifically for that, but things really started to light up a year or two later. I kept correcting my posture whenever I remember, while walking to sitting, and ESPECIALLY when seeing older people with hunched back because I’m paranoid this will be me in the future. I even have one friend in his 60’s with an extremely arched back, almost like he stepped out of a fairy tale or movie, and I always wonder whether or not it hurts.
I have a much more neutral stance. My back pain due to bad posture disappeared completely, I only feel it occasionally. My workouts at the gym are better because I can see the posture in the mirror and it’s correct and I’ve been successfully avoiding injury. I also got myself a standing desk and tried to stand for at least half the working day.
It took a lot of repetition and grit to get it done, but now my posture is a hundred times better. It’s not “perfect”, but at least it feels “natural” to sit or stand properly, the pain is gone… the pain was there because my body had not done that shit for over 25 years. And now it’s the other way around: whenever I sway my back or neck forward or stick my butt out, I feel the strain on my muscles and bones.
I had a really heavy school bag
I’m a school bus driver and every so often I have to help a kid with their bag. Holy shit those things are heavy - seems like they weigh a lot more than the kid does. Why the fuck do kids have to carry so much heavy shit? When I was in grade school I didn’t even have a bag at all.
Why the fuck do kids have to carry so much heavy shit?
Because some dumb ass adults decided we need to shove all this knowledge into their skulls whether they like it or not and we will make them carry it around needlessly using this shitty thing called “homework”. School should end with the bell. Kids need free time too.
Only seems to gets worse when they get older, too. The books just scale with them. Maybe not so bad if you’re going back and forth to your locker (is it lighter in countries without lockers?), but I used to have to hoof it to the library in college so I could bum the wifi.
It sucked. If I had to gauge it, that was 25-30lbs of textbook for about 3.5 miles of scorching heat. I also have a very known vice of looking absolutely anywhere except straight ahead of me when I’m out and about.
While I was half-turned, admiring this swallowtail butterfly a family had painted on their mailbox, my foot caught a crack in the sidewalk. Went down, my backpack fell on top of me.
I fractured a rib.
At least in my experience, sometimes, the kid may not actually have to carry that much stuff at all, and the reason they carry around such a heavy bag may be due to their own poor organization skills.
My body was made to resemble 5 wet noodles arranged like a figurine.
How do I have the form of wet noodles, with the flexibility of an autumn twig?
Maybe 5 barely-cooked noodles?
“Good posture” is a double-edged sword. Humans do not have a spine designed for being bipedal.
That sounds like something a monkey would say.
Or a monkeys son. Or a monkeys son’s son. Or a monkeys son’s son’s son. Or…
I am become Monke Sorc. Bananer of worlds.
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It’s true. “Designed” is a bit of a dangerous word in this context, but spines evolved horizontally, then rotated upright along humanity’s ancestors. There are stresses on our spines that weren’t there for millions of years, which leads to complications.
I often use designed specifically for the irony. Lol
Do you think it’s actively harmful? I hadn’t considered that.
No, not harmful. I was mostly joking, meaning that discussing creationism tends to lead to internet arguments haha
I assume by “dangerous” you mean implying intelligent design. I disagree with that being dangerous, but anyways…
The word might imply intelligent design, but the statement contradicts that, as an intelligent designer would give humans spines that are designed for being upright.
I mean, it would only contradict design by a flawless designer. Which is what the people that actually believe in intelligent design generally believe admittedly, but hypothetically, humans are plenty prone to reusing old concepts when making new things, so it wouldn’t necessarily contradict a flawed or lazy intelligent designer that just took something that already kinda works and just went “eh, good enough”.
Hey Steve, we got this crate of spines just collecting dust in the workshop. You want it?
Sure! I was just about to start making hoo-mans. Gonna save me 5 minutes, thanks!
Damn, Jason, i didn’t realize these were an older revsion. But it costs too much and takes too long to redesign so i giess I’ll use them anyway. 🤷♂️
Good point. If that is the case, my back pain and I would like to have a word with the designer. 😠
My dad has back issues. My whole life he has warned me about lifting heavy things and the importance of using proper lifting posture.
Gotta be careful and even then being careful is often not enough.
Sorry to hear about your back. :/
We’re only partway there. Legs and feet have seemingly adapted quite well, but the back has some catching up to do.
Oof ow my sciatica
Every time I try to stand with good posture, it feels fake
I never watch gamers streaming but this one made my day. Thank you, stranger. We’re all just monkeys in shoes.
I try to correct my posture sometimes but everything is just build in a way that automatically makes me hunch over a bit. At 1.91m tall Im not even that immensely tall yet I already am affected by how things are for obvious reasons designed for the standard human. Even while cooking I need to hunch over otherwise I will be uncomfortably far away from whatever Im doing since the countertop just feels too far away to do anything like chopping etc. This applies to other countertops too. And just because I need to rant about the chair in my student accommodation: Fuck the person that decided to equip this student accommodation with a chair where the headrest digs into my shoulders when sitting straight and isnt removable. Am not even allowed to sit straight. (Luckily its just an internation trimester though so Ill be leaving soon but still, I paid way to much money for this crappy accommodation)
As a fellow tall person I have accepted the fact that I will almost certainly have back issues in my 50s/60s as an inevitability. The world is very much designed for the “average height” person.
