How Your Chair is Destroying Your Spine

Imagine living in a biological Ferrari, or moving with the grace of a jaguar. Your spine has this potential, but years of sitting have left you driving a rusted bicycle instead - your chair is paralyzing you

I’m going to unpack the six stages of spinal impotence that are silently eroding your vitality, so that you can understand some of whats really happening.

Sara was on her way to her championship match when the tragedy struck; a scooter hit her, causing permanent injury. A single moment of distraction shattered her dreams.

While one of the nerves in her lower back was crushed, her spine fortunately recovered fully.

The real problem lay in her right leg though, which would never be the same.

She had to relearn walking, lifting her right hip as high as possible with each step to swing her stiff leg forward.

Her leg became an unreliable crutch with an unstable foot; rigid from relentless spasms and an ankle prone to twisting and spraining.

But you know what? This story is actually about you, not Sara. You are living with a catastrophic loss of movement.

Your spine is like her leg; stiff as a rake and unstable at its base, just like her ankle.

Instead of a sudden traumatic accident like Sara's, you've eroded your spine over decades, yet the outcome is the same.

Your spine functions similarly to Sara's leg - whether it's currently in pain or not.

And your body is full of compensations to work around the stiffness and instability in your spine.

You might find this hard to believe because your spine feels 'normal'. But this is only because you've forgotten what a healthy spine feels like.

We've all forgotten what a cooperative, mobile, and stable spine feels like, so now we believe that a stiff and unreliable spine is acceptable.

But the reality is - you're actually operating with a zombie-spine.

I've spent nearly a decade restoring and optimizing my spine. Only now have I reached a level that has revealed to me how bad my spine's condition truly was. But like you, I didn't realize it.

You might have guessed that my spine was athletic, and would've been wrong.

This pandemic of spine dysfunction and pain is right in front of us. Everyone knows a few people (probably including themselves) who are struggling with this disease - but we don't stop to question this omnipresent problem, let alone try to understand what is causing all this damage.

We know so little about our spine's abilities and have lost so much that we can't see the real problem with our situation. Ignorance is our bliss.

It's taken me over ten years of studying this problem to reach my current clarity.

So, I am going to share…

Sitting's Six Stages of Spinal Impotence

We all agree that sitting is the new smoking. But have you really thought about what this means? How does this cancer form and spread?

I’m going to break down how simple habits can produce horrendous harm with enough time.

1. Spine Centrality

Our spine is the structural foundation of our body and the dynamic central core at the heart of our movement.

Our spine is key to ALL of our physical activity. It is that important.

You can check out episode 44 for a deeper look at the central role our spine plays throughout our movement.

It should come as no surprise, then, that when we sit, our chair only supports our spine - our arms and legs depend on our spine.

The base of our spine rests on our chair's seat, with the rest of our spine supported upright by the backrest. Our legs hang to the ground while our arms work in front of us.

So, as central as our spine is to movement, it's equally central to sitting and its consequences.

The chair is basically a device that supports our spine. If our spine is supported, our body is supported.

2. Mind-Body (Dis)Connection

The very value proposition of the chair, then, is that we can completely forget about our spine for extended periods and give all our attention to our knowledge work.

Our chairs allow us to forget about everything other than our chosen cognitive challenge.

There is no need for us to be aware of or control our spine.

Our nervous system stops paying attention to inputs from our spine, and stops producing outputs to control it.

In other words, the chair severs our mind-body connection, our mind-spine connection.

And unfortunately, there is no free lunch - every action has consequences.

3. Use It or Lose It

Our movement systems exemplify the 'use it or lose it' phenomenon.

Neurons that fire together wire together, and those that don't, won't. The same is true for our muscles, bones, and connective tissues, which atrophy when we don’t use them.

Unused neural pathways, or nerves, are pruned - a process called neural pruning. Unused muscles and connective tissues calcify and wither away.

So, instead of a traumatic incident cutting the connections and weakening the structures, as it did for Sara, our chair has been doing this to us, slowly but surely, for a long time.

The result? We can't 'see' or sense or coordinate what is happening in our body, especially around our spine. And our structures have become weak and have lost resilience.

Consequently, our spine has become unstable and stiff with spasms, and easily damaged.

A stiff and unstable spine opposes efficient movement.

This is where the real problems begin.

4. Inefficient Movement

The lack of awareness and control over our spine, from accumulated sitting, becomes blindness and paralysis throughout all of our movement.

We simply cannot move with youthful athleticism if our spine is numb and rigid.

Trust me for a moment, and believe me when I say that your spine is what makes you feel young or old - even though we've all somehow forgotten that it even plays a role in our lives.

Our freedom of movement gives us our sense of physical freedom in life. Our spine is central to our movement.

You actually need to regain some of its power before you'll appreciate what’s been missing.

It's not only our capacity for movement that suffers, but also its quality. Every pattern and position becomes plagued by inefficiency and insufficiency.

Then, if combine this degraded movement with the structural weaknesses from sitting, you have a recipe for disaster.

5. Joint Stress

The problem with inefficient movement isn’t just that it requires more effort, though that’s a huge burden. The bigger problem is that it creates imbalanced and concentrated stress on our joints.

Instead of balanced, supported, and distributed loads, our joints must bear unbalanced, unsupported, and concentrated stresses - this accelerates our breakdown.

Our movement is a collection of habits, repeated patterns. So, if our movement tends to strain our joints, it will strain them repeatedly, continuously in fact.

We need our neuromuscular structures to control our joints. If they don't, wear and tear will prevail.

6. Breakdown

My three primary biomechanics coaches, Prof. McGill, Coach Christopher Sommer, and Dr. Kelly Starrett, taught me my most valuable lesson about injuries: poor movement causes most injuries through the slow and sneaky accumulation of joint stress.

Despite this fact seeming obvious to me now, a grand delusion dominates us: people believe that injuries come from nowhere and will go back into nothingness.

Most people pray that their injuries will eventually disappear without them changing anything. However, for things to change, something must be changed.

It's our aversion to taking full responsibility that is the real challenge.

Most 'unexplained' and 'overnight' injuries are easily explainable and don't happen suddenly; they are the result of long-term self-harm.

It's on us to change our behavior; simple but not easy.

"The single biggest threat to our health is our chair." - Dr. Kelly Starrett

In summary:

“Sitting is more dangerous than smoking, kills more people than HIV, and is more treacherous than parachuting. We are sitting ourselves to death." - Dr. James Levine, Mayo Clinic

One reason I'm so grateful for having spent the first decade of my professional career focused on back pain is that it is the strictest teacher of many lessons. There is no hiding from the truth.

It doesn't matter what you think or believe: you must take absolute responsibility or expect more pain and sacrifice.

Remember, most people facing this challenge don't see themselves as responsible. The easiest way to know if you fall into this category is by taking an honest look at your situation and your response to it.

The centrality of our spine leads to an extremely varied range of symptoms, but under their hoods, the core mechanics are the same.

Count yourself in if:

• You have back or neck pain now
• You've had back or neck pain before
• You don't feel confident lifting things up
• You don't feel comfortable at the end of a day's work
• You find standing uncomfortable
• You've stopped doing sports, exercises, and activities because you find them too uncomfortable (interestingly, this is why cycling is becoming so popular - people have given up everything else, as most activities on their feet hurt too much)
• You believe that stretching your spine is helpful
• You believe that your therapist can fix it for you
• You believe that waiting will allow it to heal

If even one of these applies to you, I recommend you re-evaluate your approach.

Another reason I believe that the harmful impact of sitting is underrated is that its consequences are not direct; they are second-order.

Sitting ruins our movement patterns and weakens our movement structures. Then, moving poorly on vulnerable structures wreaks havoc, while sitting hides in the background.

It is our duty to look a bit deeper and to be honest with ourselves.

The Hidden Truth

The time has come to STOP thinking that it's not that bad because it will almost certainly get worse.

Stop thinking that it'll go away soon because it's much more likely to stay.

Stop thinking that it just needs a good therapy session and then it will be fine.

Stop telling yourself that you are immune to your daily sitting - if you feel fine, that doesn't mean anything - the breakdown is building up in the background.

And most of all, stop telling yourself it's because you're older than you were and this is to be expected; it's not. You have simply accumulated more time sitting and, consequently, more time moving badly. That's all. You can age very differently if you choose.

“Lack of activity destroys the good condition of every human being, while movement and methodical physical exercise save it and preserve it." - Plato

Our Potential

I've had back injuries, and I thought they would heal on their own, that they would go away, that they would be fixed with help. But I was wrong.

Eventually, I made some progress and started doing the right stability exercises - this helped a lot, but it was not enough. It gave me some strength and improved some of my patterns, but it was not enough to get me completely right.

Years later, I found the missing piece, the other wing on this bird - safety (or spine hygiene, as McGill calls it).

Only then, with both strategies, could I restore some of my spine's 'vision' and free it from some of its 'paralysis'.

Over the decade that has passed since, I have reached new levels, and only now, after reconnecting on some deeper layers of awareness and control, have I grasped how deeply disconnected I was before. How disconnected we all are. We've lost all our resolution - we're operating with a very pixelated black and white when there is a potential of 4K with millions of colors.

Back pain from sitting is a huge problem, and it's not easy to overcome. Worst of all, most advice out there is insufficient at best.

However, I've cracked the code. I've figured out the root causes, the first principles which govern this problem. And I've shown hundreds of high-impact knowledge workers how to escape from the grip of back pain - for good. I feel bulletproof, despite spending ungodly amounts of time in front of a screen and having previously had my own back injuries.

The good news for you is that I've systematized my journey, and you can join me and experience spine strength despite saving the world through a computer screen every day.

There is a way.

The Obstacle is the Way

The problem is, we have lost our connection with our spine, and it has become weak.

The solution, which is our opportunity, is to reconnect with our spine and to strengthen it.

Reconnecting with our spine, or restoring our sensory resolution around our spine, can be cultivated by paying very close attention to its movements, over and over again.

Resolution is the byproduct of investing our attention in our movement QUALITY. Not good or bad quality, but quality as a characteristic. How do you move your spine, not how much? This is the qualitative versus quantitative experience of our spine.

This requires an approach to movement that emphasizes impeccable technique, control, and refinement.

You need to choose movement positions and patterns which are helpful to your goal, and then be obsessively meticulous about mastering them - about extracting every drop of juice possible from them.

The problem we face is big, but the opportunity is much bigger. There are only a few things you can do in this life which will be as beneficial as restoring your spine towards its potential.

Restoring this system of structures, and building a relationship with the dynamic core of your physical self, is rewarding beyond anything I can describe - you have to taste it for yourself.

Try to imagine the sensation of living in a walking and breathing Ferrari. Of moving with the confidence and strength of a jaguar. Think of the extra joy when you can do the things you love, and you can do them better than you could ever do them before, and without fear. For many people, just being pain-free and injury-proof are more than enough, but there is so much more within reach.

Back pain is a bigger problem than you know. Not only globally but personally - you are certainly much worse off than you realize. And more importantly, you have far more potential to feel good, from your spine alone, than you can currently comprehend.

If you want to walk the road to your life's potential, you will need maximum freedom of movement, which depends entirely on your spinal core. If you want to feel the feeling of living in a biological supercar, you're going to need to start thinking about your movement very differently. And you're going to need to, patiently and persistently, start a revolution throughout the layers of your body - focusing on your spine.

If you're not sure where to begin, I recommend you get started with the SPINE STRENGTH project I've put together on my website. Part 1 covers spinal safety, and part 2 covers spine stability. I've put a lot of time and energy into packaging what I've learned into something that you can follow along with and achieve an impeccable degree of quality.

However, if you're not ready to take action now, just subscribe to the YouTube channel, podcast, or newsletter - you'll become much more likely to take action in the future because it is my mission to empower and inspire you to do just that.

If you know someone who's struggling with back pain or could benefit from this information? Then, do your good deed for the day - share this with them. You might just change their life.

Lastly, you can catch these discussions in both video format on YouTube and as audio-only episodes on my podcast, The Craig Van Cast. Choose your preferred medium and tune in!

Cheers.