Five Postures That Protect You During Long Working Hours
It has been nearly a decade since medical researchers started proclaiming that “sitting is the new smoking"
However, like smokers, most individuals find it difficult to break their new age ‘addiction’ due to two primary reasons - one, their livelihood increasingly involves this sedentary position; and two, their leisure or entertainment activities are also predominantly sedentary.
But is sitting really the new smoking? As a medical doctor, I would say definitely yes, given the overwhelming evidence. However, from a social perspective, I believe that sitting poses a far greater threat than smoking simply because it affects almost everyone, unlike smoking, which now only impacts a minority due to the success of global anti-tobacco campaigns. In other words, sitting has become an inescapable peril for the majority.
While excessive sitting poses numerous health risks, they can be broadly classified into lifestyle-related diseases such as obesity, diabetes, hypertension, cancer, heart attack, and stroke, as well as postural issues like low back pain, cervical spondylosis, poor body posture, carpal tunnel syndrome, varicose veins, constipation, piles, etc.
Although my focus here is mainly on postures that help prevent these postural issues, many of them also contribute to mitigating lifestyle diseases. Let's start with two corrective postures suitable for your working hours, followed by three yoga/exercise positions that are highly beneficial.
Protective Posture 1: 90-90-90 DEGREES SITTING
Also known as the neutral sitting position, 90-90-90 sitting entails maintaining a posture where your hips, knees, and ankles form 90-degree angles. This is a fundamental and crucial postural correction for anyone who works while seated. Your feet should rest flat on the ground without crossing or stretching them. Your head and neck should be aligned neutrally, with eyes looking straight ahead. To maintain this posture, ensure your workstation is ergonomic, with your computer screen at eye level and your table and keyboard allowing your elbows to rest at 90 degrees or more. Although sitting in this position for extended periods (30+ minutes) may become uncomfortable, it's a signal that it's time to stand up, which brings us to the next point!
Protective Posture 2: STAND UP & SIT DOWN ONLY ON LEGS
As a doctor, I recommend standing up and walking around every 30 minutes, as research shows that without such movement, molecular level changes that encourage obesity, diabetes and cardiovascular changes are subtly triggered throughout the body. Also, in contrast, the moment you start moving from rest, metabolomics studies show that over 3000 molecules start a beneficial symphony in your blood, tissues & organs. While it may not be practical to walk around every 30 minutes in most offices, I can share a neat hack to achieve a similar effect. Simply stand up slowly, perform a brief arms-above-head stretch, and sit down slowly using only your legs—focus on the slow descent to maximize muscle toning benefits from eccentric contraction.
Protective Posture 3: GLUTE BRIDGE / SETU BANDHA
Now we move from postural corrections that you can do at the office during working hours, to postures that you can do at home before. and after work that will strengthen your body against the effects of too much sitting. The most important among them is the popular move, glute bridge. It is a
universal exercise finding ready parallels in yoga’s setu bandhasana and pilate’s bridging on the mat, with some subtle differences between them. But basically for all glute bridges, you lie down straight, face up, draw up your knees, with ankles placed as close to your buttocks as possible, and then slowly lift up your upper body, hold it and come down also slowly. Glute bridge strengthens your lower back muscles, abdominals, glutes & hamstrings against the stress they go through during prolonged sitting. The Trigr super-app has a live AI trainer that helps you do glutes and other exercises / yoga poses the correct way.
Protective Posture 4: THE CAT AND COW POSE
The next most important pose for strengthening all the muscles weakened by prolonged sitting is the wonderfully relaxing cat and cow pose from yoga, called in Sanskrit as marjaryasana (cat pose) and bitilasana (cow pose) or sometimes using its combined name chakravakasana. In this, you get down on all your fours (palms and knees), with palms directly beneath the shoulder joints and knees directly beneath your hips with your back flat and straight like a table. The cat pose comes first in which you inhale deep and bend your back in slowly with your neck and face stretched partially up and buttocks stretched back maximum. Hold this position for a few seconds, and then start exhaling while you reverse your back bend slowly into a forward bend by humping your back like a cow, hold for a few seconds again, before returning to the cat. There is also a chair cat & cow, in which you do these poses while sitting erect on your chair.
Protective Posture 5: FLOOR SITS / YOGA SITS
Sitting on the floor is becoming a lost art for the new generation. Yet in these sitting positions lie the secrets for strengthening the whole body to combat the new age work stressors including those from prolonged sitting in chairs. Yoga and ancient wellness practices of India, as well as countries like China, Japan, Korea and African and Arab nations are replete with floor sitting poses that can still guard against the postural issues due to our modern lifestyles. Most of them work by keeping the spine, upper body, hips, buttocks, thighs and legs in positions that are beneficial to health. Such poses from yoga include the simple cross legged sitting of Easy Pose or Sukhasana famed for its calming effect; the Cobbler Pose or Bhadrasana which is reputed in yoga as a ‘destroyer of diseases’; the digestive and brain rejuvenating Thunderbolt Pose or Vajrasana, and the most highly valued Lotus Pose or Padmasana with its varied benefits on the body, posture and mind.
