Finding Ease Part 2 – Sitting

***Please read Finding Ease Part 1 – Making Peace with Posture and Pain prior to reading and watching the video below:

Ah, sitting, Western culture’s perceived demon. Is it really that bad? The alternative of standing all day isn’t fairing well in research or in practice, so perhaps it is time that we reconsider making peace with sitting.

One of the questions I ask about sitting, is how often are most of us really “using a chair as a chair”? Are we resting in a chair, or are we desperately trying to meet the cultural phenomena of “good posture” and not allowing our body to take a rest? We look at the phenomena of lumbar flexion-relaxation in standing during bending behaviors and we see that it is hard to let our lumbar extensors rest when we are in pain. It has also been shown that in some cases, even after pain resolves it is still hard for us to “let the back go”. When we look at sitting behavior of the lumbar extensors in pain-free individuals, there is a nice relaxation of the lumbar extensors during slouched sitting. Coincidentally, much like standing trunk flexion, people experiencing low back pain have decreased flexion relaxation in sitting.

Clinically, I see this every day with my patients who cannot tolerate sitting well. Even when slouched, they struggle to really be at ease in any chair. There is this disconnect between finding comfort and holding their body how they believe they “should” be holding it. They can’t give themselves permission to shift to a more comfortable position, and if they do change, it seems like their only option is a big giant “ants in the pants” change to find momentary relief for their nerves that have been screaming for blood, movement, and space. My early attempts at telling people simply to “relax” were relatively fruitless. People didn’t start getting more comfortable with long bouts of sitting until I transitioned to an experience-based approach to exploring options and introducing variability throughout the body for finding ease in the sitting. All the while combining the experience with pain science education. Thanks again to Joe Witte for inspiring the foundation for this experience, I have definitely been doing a dis-service to the simplicity of his approach.