Many of us feel rather tense and tight across different parts of our body. Perhaps, it is more like stiff legs, hips and lower back. Tight muscles could create multiple problems throughout our body. Pain and aches are caused by reduced blood flow and oxygen to specific tight areas. Modern humans have evolved quite far and they have conditioned to walk and stand up straight. Unfortunately, we spend much of our time sitting down. The immense popularity of computer and TV has encouraged this relatively new lifestyle. Each morning, we get up in the morning, we eat breakfast, drive to work, sit down at our office chair, have lunch, drive home, watch TV, eat dinner and go back to sleep. Our lifestyle simply revolves around sitting down, regardless of what activity we do.
If we count how many hours we are awake and how much time we spend seated, some of us may discover that we spend well over 90 percent of our time sitting down the whole day. From physical point of view, a continuous seated position could do plenty of negative things to our biomechanics and posture. Firstly, we switch off many muscles by sitting down. As opposed to nice and upright posture, we tend to sit with C-shaped position, our shoulders lean forward and our chin drop. When we work in front of the computer, we only activate small muscles of our fingers and hands, while leaving our bigger muscles, on thigh, abdominal areas and other parts switched off.
This common situation could cause chest, rotator cuff and hip flexors to become stiff and tighten up. This could cause a variety of other problems, such as joint stiffness, muscle stiffness, muscle pain, loss of movement, tension headaches, shoulder pain, neck pain, lower back pain and poor blood circulation. Our poorly functioning tissues could hold our life back severely. Muscles are connective tissue that surround important organs and connect bones. It also covers nerves and blood vessel. Muscles are strong and it could allow bones to lift heavy weights. So, it is a sad fact that many people suffer from various debilitating conditions caused by poor seating behaviours. There are many jobs that require us to sit more than 40 hours each week and this situation can be bad for our bodies.
Muscle restrictions can cause limited body movements, because our body has been pulled out of alignment. This could lead to bad posture and with a biomechanically inefficient body, we could use too much energy for a simple task. Just sitting and eating dinner can be particularly painful and the misery could become unbearable in the office. They need to sit all the time as their job requires it and this vicious cycle can be very hard to escape. However, people who manage to drag themselves outside the cubicle and take a few minutes of brisk walk every hour usually suffer much less in the end. So, constant exercise is one thing that keep us having this kind of pain.