Healthy habits for your home or work office.
Your workstation is so important to your productivity, wellbeing, and peace of mind!
With a proper home or work office setup, you might feel that you are ready to take on the world!
With an improper setup, you are likely doomed from the start.
But what is a proper workstation setup? How much does it cost to have an efficient workstation?
You could get an Eames Executive Chair By Herman Miller for about $4,000 that likely has all you would need for a great chair!
Next you can get a Solid Wood Elegante XT Electric Sit Stand Desk w/ Voice Control for the price of about $1,800.
So now that you have the chair and desk figured out, it is time for the computer monitor….
As hopefully you can see by now, it is possible to spend a cool $10,000 on office equipment without even thinking about it!
Ergonomics, or “the study of people’s efficiency in their working environment”, is a booming industry in todays culture.
Ergonomics is all around us in daily life. However, we as Physical Therapists have an in-depth understanding of how the human body moves, and common areas of fault within these movements. These areas of fault usually stem from a simple lack of knowledge of how to move. Our job is to assist the patient in moving better than they were moving before. Once this has been corrected, in my experience the patient rarely has the severity of issues they previously had. So instead of buying fancy equipment to hide our problems, lets address the problem head on!
Healthy habits for your home or work office, common Movement faults:
- Slumped sitting in your office
- Static positions are not healthy
- You can sit just as bad as you can stand at home or at work
Slumped sitting in your home or work office
Have you ever thought about how much load your lower back experiences while sitting?
As you can see, sitting is back, but sitting in a slumped position is even worse!
Static positions are not healthy
So after looking at the image above, does it now make sense that if you maintain a slumped sitting posture for hours a day, for years and years, why your back or neck hurt?
Believe it or not, but your body was not designed to stay in one position for 8 hours a day for 40 hours a week for years on end.
Remaining still is worse than moving incorrectly sometimes!
You can sit just as bad as you can stand at home or at work
Believe it or not, and hear me out on this…
It is possible to sit just as bad as you stand.
Think about the next time that you go to the store…as you are waiting for your turn to check out. You will see what I am talking about….
As you can see, these people’s standing postures are… undesirable. Over time they can lead to back pain, neck pain and shoulder pain!
For more information about shoulder pain, please check out my blog Why Does My Shoulder Hurt?
What to do about all of this?
Hands down, my favorite solution is aptly named the “towel trick”…
What is that you ask?
You roll up a towel like so:
Then you put the towel just where your butt bones are
Next you sit down…..
See how my posture improves simply by sitting on the towel!
My posture has now improved and my muscles are working to keep me upright. No fancy or expensive chairs!
Give this a try for yourself!
I will be doing several live videos to let you know what can be done for our home office. Please reach out below for more information.
