Video and Transcript: Exercises to Improve Posture While Sitting

Hi everyone, Doctor Orit Hickman here, physical therapist, and I just wanted to put together a really quick video for you guys on posture because this topic has come up a lot in the last few days and even more so in the last few weeks and months. Because, I myself have been going through physical therapy for neck pain, upper back pain, headaches, and dizziness.

It turns out dizziness can be caused by muscles that are super, duper tight in the neck, primarily at the base of the skull.

So I wanted to just put together a really quick video because I talked about posture a lot in the clinic and maybe not even enough most of the time. And there's a lot of, there's a lot of ways to look at your posture, but it's really hard for us to feel when we're not in good posture. Somebody else can look at us and say, “Wow, what's up with that forward head position?”. But, it's really, really hard for us to feel it ourselves. And so I'm going to give you some suggestions on things you can look for when you're in a sitting position. Then I will probably do a separate video for standing posture.

So let's start with sitting posture. Right, so, first thing I'm going to do is, I'm going to bring this mat table down because it's too high for me and because of that my feet are not touching the ground.

So if you sit in a chair all day long, ideally your feet are firmly planted on the ground. If not, you want to maybe get a box and put that under your feet so that your legs are roughly at a 90 90 position. And what that means is that you've got about 90 degrees in your knee and about 90 degrees in your hip.

And, and realistically what we do want, is we want to make sure your knees are not above the level of your hip. So even having your knees a little bit below your hip is going to be a better position and actually frees up your pelvis a little bit.

Something else to think about is, if you're short like or a vertically challenged, most office chairs are not actually created for my frame. So if you have the ability to get a petite chair, if you are a petite person then that makes sense because then the distance from where your butt sits to where your knee is is a shorter distance. So you're not getting back in the chair and sitting yourself all the way back against the back of the chair and then your legs are kind of dangling or there's too much pressure behind your knees.

But we're just going to talk about posture right now and I'm going to get too much into ergonomics of a workstation. So feet firmly planted on the surface and the ground and your knees relaxed you don't want your knees rolled in you don't want them too wide, out about shoulder length or hip-width apart, straight place for them to be.

Next you want to come to your pelvis and what you want to try to do is run around your pelvis so it's kind of the c-shaped position. And then you want to go the opposite directions so that your back is really arched. And you want to go back and forth between those two positions until you find what we call mid-range. And it should feel really comfortable to sit in mid-range. So you're not quite sitting on your sit bones. It's almost like you're just in front of your sit bones.

So if you sit back on your tailbone or sit back on your sit bones, the tendency is going to be, the longer you're there are you going to feel the best place to go is to be slumped. So if you're to arch, then your back muscles get really, really, really tight and you might feel a lot of strain all the way up into your middle back, so that somewhere in between is a great place to be.

Next thing you want to do is, you want to put your hands on your ribs and you want to take a deep breath and as you do that, you want to think about placing your, so they are right on top of your pelvis. Okay, so that means that if you are way far forward before you should be a little bit further back. If you’re really back, you should be a little bit further forward. This is probably not going to feel really comfortable at first because it's going to feel odd. You're probably used to a different position and now you're trying to change that. It will take a while for your inner ear and the maps on your brain that target where you are in space to really know that this is an okay position.

So you're going to probably want to do this several times throughout the day for several days before you start to feel like “Okay that feels comfortable”.

The next is shoulders and I am telling you it's really, really hard to know where your shoulder should be in space. I'm speaking from personal experience. So a lot of people will like throw their shoulders way far back, then their head will be really far forward. And so it's not as big a correction as you think. So there's a really simple thing that you can do, is that you can shrug your shoulders up. You can turn your pinkies forward. So you turn your palms way far forward and then drop your shoulder back down and what that does is, it actually brings your shoulder blades from forward to just resting on your rib cage. So again it's a shoulder-shrug fingers forward or pinkies forward and then shoulders back down. That should feel fairly comfortable.

Throughout the day, if you're finding that your shoulders want to slump forward, this is a really quick correction. And you can just bring your shoulder blade back where they need to be and go from there.

The last is where your head and your neck are and really want to make sure that, this might be really helpful, is have somebody actually look at you from the side because if you are lined up properly and your head is lined up properly your earlobes should actually be right over top of your point of the center point of the shoulder which should also be in right on top of your hip as if we were to drop plumb line straight down the center of your earlobe they should hit those three spots. So if you can't have somebody, there isn't somebody there, the other thing to do is to actually do the opposite, what you think would be just turtle your head way far forward and then bring your head really far back almost as if you were taking a drawer and you were opening the drawer and then you're closing the drawer. And then you bring your head way far forward and then you allow it to come forward just a little bit so it goes way far back and then you let it come forward a little bit because you're not supposed to be really far back all the time. Right, that is going to be really uncomfortable. So you just want to bring your head a little bit in front of that really, really further back position that you went to. And that should put you pretty close to a neutral spine position.

Now if it doesn't, or if it causes pain, or you just don't know, then the best next thing to do is, to take a photo of yourself or have somebody take a photo of yourself and look “Is my earlobe in line with my shoulder which is in line with my hip?” And if it's still not ,then the best next thing after that is to come in and see a physical therapist so that we can look at your posture and how to problem solve a little bit about how you should be sitting at your desk or how you should be working all day long.

All right, hope that was helpful. Have a great one, take care!