How Sitting Wreaks Havoc on Your Body (and How to Fix It)

Beyond the obvious stress and discomfort that sitting causes, a more significant threat to our freedom and vitality lurks beneath the surface.

If every moment of every activity shapes us, then ur time spent sitting has deeply ingrained the chair into our body. Our tissues and structures have been unnaturally loaded for immense amounts of time, leading to weakness, tightness, and disconnection.

Sitting is, by design, an anti-movement. It severely compromises our coordination and connection with our body. The chair's influence reaches further than you know.

Accumulated Stubbornness

Sitting stresses our spine's structures, making back pain unavoidable. However, the real danger is less direct and more insidious.

Our bodies have been accumulating the consequences of sitting ever since we were propped up at the adult table in a baby chair. These effects cemented themselves during our developmental years and have since become part of our body's normal state.

The changes from sitting have become so deeply ingrained that they require deliberate and focused efforts to unravel their stubborn knots. Some of these changes form self-reinforcing habit loops. Even if we could eliminate sitting altogether, we would continue to reinforce these bad habits throughout the rest of our day.

To truly experience our body free from the impact of sitting, we need to do more than just sit less and sit better. We must figure out how to reverse a lifetime of sitting. This is the goal of our dedicated corrective movement practice, where we use movement to restore our ability to move.

To know what movement we need, we must understand how sitting has changed us over the years.

Two Slow Punctures

I categorize the physical consequences of sitting into two buckets: 'Spinal Instability' and 'Limb Immobility'. This is the inverse of what biomechanists broadly consider the foundation of healthy and athletic movement: spine stability with limb mobility.

A stable spine with mobile limbs is considered an effective foundation of movement for most people.

Spine Instability

Starting at our center, sitting quietly strips away our spinal stability. We lose the skill and habit of keeping our spine supported. An unsupported spine deteriorates much quicker than a stable one.

Our spine support, including core and back musculature, must deteriorate if left unused for extended periods. Use it or lose it. Neurons that fire together, wire together - those that don't, won't. These unused muscles and neural pathways gradually dissolve.

We lose the skill and ability to deliberately support our own spine. The habit of automatically and unconsciously supporting our spine erodes, day by day, decade after decade.

An unsupported spine is ineffective - like removing a leg from a tripod, leaving essentially nothing. A spine unsupported or inappropriately supported by its core will buckle to the limits of its joints and connective tissues.

Buckling Joints

On its own, the spine is an unstable stack of bones, held together by a family of incredibly strong connective tissues. The spine comprises vertebral bones connected by joints made of intervertebral discs and ligaments.

If a spine stripped of its muscles were stood upright with only its connective tissue for support, it would flop over like a noodle until reaching the limits of the connective tissues. These limits form the primary function of the connective tissues - allowing enough space for movement while forming a strict container.

The discs act as hydraulic cushions to allow and withstand compressive forces, while ligaments keep our bones fixed in relation to one another. The spine itself has 24 joints allowing movement across three curvatures, which enable our spine to respond like a shock absorber, among other functions.

The systems of muscles supporting our spine operate like a guide-wire system, stabilizing and distributing loads in many directions across numerous structures. However, when this muscle system malfunctions, usually due to poor coordination and laziness, our spine collapses to its limits set by the connective tissues.

Stress Concentrations

Our discs are well-designed to tolerate loading within their safe range for a lifetime, but loading them at or near their limits is far less sustainable.

Discs have a gel-cushion center within a strong fibrous ring. In mid-ranges, spinal loads compress the cushion and dissipate outwards into the fibrous ring. However, when a vertebral joint reaches the end of its range, loads bypass the cushion and directly compress or stretch the fibrous ring, compressing it on the short side of the buckling joint and stretching it on the long side.

The fibrous ring is designed to withstand enormous loads from the cushion within it but doesn't tolerate direct compression and tensile loads from above and below very well. When spine joints buckle, the load transfers from the global muscle system to a local connective tissue structure, amplifying the distributed load from diffused to concentrated.

Fortunately, these connective tissues are extremely resilient - if used in alignment with their design. But stressing them inefficiently may only withstand the first several thousand or tens of thousands of insults - not year after year, for decades, with no real opportunity to recover.

Repetitive Stress

Remember, our spine is central to all our movement, and its main function is to bear load. Unless we're lying down horizontally, our spine must bear our body's weight. This means that any bad habit our spine develops when bearing load will be present continuously.

If our spine's joints tend to buckle under load, and our spine is constantly loaded, then our spine's joints must buckle to the end of their ranges constantly, transferring loads to our connective tissues and joints.

Moreover, spinal discs tolerate loads much less sustainably when buckled versus when supported. This constant stress on the joints and connective tissues of our spine is where the real danger lies.

Most modern sitters alternate their lower back's shape from buckled in flexion to buckled in extension, flip-flopping like a noodle between extremes, with very little time spent supported. Professor Stuart McGill likens this back-and-forth buckling to breaking a paper clip - you stand no chance trying to snap a fresh clip, but bend it back and forth enough times, and it will snap on its own.

However, don't be fooled by all this talk of spinal breakdown and deterioration. Our spine is extremely tough, housing and supporting our most precious parts. The forces required to injure a completely healthy spine in one sweep must be in the range experienced in car accidents or falling from a height of a few stories.

But with enough patience, even a rock will be cut in half by a persistent stream of water. The consistent and accumulating effects of sitting will eventually wreak havoc on even these most resilient structures.

The relentless onslaught of microtrauma, combined with insufficient recovery, primes our spines for drama. It's not one final straw that breaks the camel's back; it's all the straws together. It's not that one heavy deadlift or unlucky sneeze that 'bursts your discs', but all the reps over all the years, combined.

One of Professor Stuart McGill's most important contributions to understanding lower back disorders and injuries, in general, is that accumulative insult produces most structural breakdown, not one-off events. Behind almost all back injuries lies a long chain of harmful movements. Poor spine movement is the cause of spinal instability.

Therefore, the killer beast we must slay to restore order in the spinal kingdom is spinal instability and poor spinal movement. But before we dive headfirst into this fight, we must know that this beast has a powerful sidekick.

Limb Immobility

While we sit on the chair, seduced by the backrest, its tentacles wrap around our limbs. At first, we don't notice, but suddenly, we can't escape their grip.

Let's start with what happens in our hips, then discuss the shoulders.

In our lower body, when we sit, our hips flex to roughly a ninety-degree square angle, our knees follow suit, and our legs stay fairly close to one another. There's nothing inherently wrong with these positions, but when we overuse them and underuse the rest, our limbs develop a bias towards these positions, reflected in the structures themselves. Our physical development must follow the reality of our activity.

If our limbs are in flexed positions most of the time, they will develop towards flexion. If our limbs don't spend much time in other positions, they will develop away from those positions.

Chronically flexing our hips leads to shortening and tightening over the front and weakening and wasting over the back, forcing our overreliance on the front and creating difficulty in accessing the structures at the back.

This imbalance, referred to as Lower Cross Syndrome by therapists, is a rotten root at the core of many modern issues. Concerning lower back pain, this hip imbalance forces our body to compensate for the lost power and mobility, causing us to overuse the joints just above and below - our lower back and knees. We use our spine to produce movement that should come from our hips, and where our hips have lost range of motion, we ask our lower back to make up for it.

In our upper body, when sitting, we constantly reach forward with our arms and round our upper back and shoulders forward. This leads to shoulders tightened and restricted into forward-rounded positions - tight over the front and weak and wasted over the back.

The result is similar to our lower body: we deteriorate in some areas and overdevelop in others. We lose the functions of important muscles and critical ranges of motion. Therapists call the changes around the shoulder, neck, and upper back Upper Cross Syndrome. The result is pain and injury in our upper spine and arms.

Having forward-rounded shoulders puts much more stress on our neck because our arms' full weight isn't supported by the muscles in the back of our shoulder and upper back - instead, it hangs from our neck. Our upper back eventually screams from pain after years of being stretched all day, every day, slouched under load. We should expect any muscle burdened with load, stretched to full length every day, to eventually scream at us.

Tight shoulders also lead to an overreliance on our lower back; we compensate for the missing range of motion when reaching our limits - think about reaching upwards or behind you; most of us just bend our spine to make it possible.

Where to from here?

Sitting is not merely theoretically toxic, moving us conceptually in the opposite direction of an athlete's ideal (spine stability with limb mobility). The real consequences of the chair are outright inhumane.

We don't make people work in asbestos-filled factories anymore, and one day we will look back at the stupidity of spending so much time sitting.

Spine stability and limb mobility are our priorities, our main weapons in the battle against the arch-enemy of our freedom of movement. Through these two doors - a stable spine and mobile limbs - we can leave the chair's shackles behind and taste the sweet nectar of movement freedom again.

But what does that look like? Spine stability and limb mobility are just concepts - what do they actually point towards?

We need spine stability to keep our spine safely supported and protected, to stabilize and support all our movement, and we need enough limb mobility to avoid compromising our spine stability.

By understanding how the spine and its support systems work, we can create a movement plan that maximizes these insights, aiming for a spine that's as stable as possible - a marvelous example of the engineering and beauty of the human body.

Finding our Spine Stability is like discovering our body's main support beam. Combined with the perfect mix of strength and flexibility, we can start to remember what it feels like to move well and feel great.

Spine stability, when developed, is a mechanical miracle of the human body - genius in function and gorgeous in form. Proper Spine Stability is our Kinetic Keystone - the key to all our movement.

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.

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