Humans Aren’t Made to Sit In Chairs: The Importance of Mobility
For many of us, daily life includes a lot of time sitting, whether that’s at work, in the car or just some good old-fashion relaxing on the couch. In fact, a study cited by Harvard found that on average, participants spent over 10 hours a day sitting down.
Now consider this: We have only been sitting in chairs for about 2.5% of the entire existence of the human race. To put it bluntly, we are not made to sit in chairs! And while many people choose to sit in ways that are considered “ergonomic,” this just means a position that most likely won’t put a ton of stress on the nerves and joints.
We spend years of our lives sitting for the majority of our waking hours, and then try to counteract that inactivity by hitting the gym for a couple hours of cardio or doing some strength training…and then wonder why our bodies still feel like crap. It’s a popular meme these days that as soon as you hit 30, your body always hurts and getting up from the ground sounds like popcorn.
How does all this sitting affect our bodies?
Our experience working with clients at VIVO Training Systems has revealed that people’s mobility in particular is negatively impacted by all this sitting. (Side note: When we say “mobility,” we’re referring to your ability to move through your body’s full range of motion in a controlled manner.)
When you spend a lot of time in any position, your body adapts to that position. For example, if you wear heels all the time, your Achilles tendon will lose the ability to lengthen all the way from being in a constantly shortened position.
The same happens when you spend so much time sitting. The muscles on the front of the body get shortened, and the muscles on the back of the body tend to be lengthened and thus weakened. Then when we try to exercise, our pelvis is out of alignment and often our ribs, neck and shoulders are too. This puts excessive strain on weak muscles and often doesn’t allow proper core muscle activation to support our movements.
The end result? Injury — to your back, shoulders, neck, knees, etc. Or even if you don’t fully hurt yourself, things get achy, making it harder to build strength and feel good. It’s quite difficult to continue with a habit that doesn’t feel good, so often, we simply quit working out.
The solution to this is twofold, but pretty straightforward:
Spend less time sitting, especially in the same position.
Do things to counteract the loss of mobility and loss of muscle activation.
This leads us back to our first point: Mobility.
At VIVO Training Systems, we start every workout with exercises to help counteract any mobility issues we have assessed in our clients (or ourselves). We also include exercises that help activate muscles that need extra attention, which for many people means various muscles of the core and the glutes. Each workout ends with stretches that help keep muscles from becoming too tight.
Bottom line: If you want to counteract time spent sitting, make sure your workout program includes dynamic mobility before and static mobility after so that you can get the gains, without the pain.
Not sure how to do this? We’re launching a VIVO Training Systems membership so that anyone can access our mobility library, and help make working out a sustainable habit — sign up to learn more here!