Why Sitting Causes Pain & How to Fix It
Lifestyle choices are the primary driver of chronic pain. Unfortunately, prolonged sitting, which occupies most of our day while we relax, commute, work, and exercise, is linked to poor physiological outcomes.
This leaves us with a dilemma: how do we keep our bodies healthy when our daily lives demand more and more sitting?
Your body will sit on your command with little complaint or effort, eventually adapting to it. "Great, right? If my body adapts, I should be able to sit comfortably without pain or injury. The problem must be that my body isn't used to it yet. Once it adapts, I’ll sit pain-free for life. I just need to push through the initial discomfort."
Theoretically, yes, but realistically, no. Even if you fully adapt to sitting, you might struggle with essential tasks: carrying shopping bags, reaching for a jar on the top shelf, or picking items up off the floor—they will all carry a high risk of injury.
Simple actions such as walking, bending, and reaching demand that your body function as a complex, dynamic, and interconnected unit. The foundation for this is a musculoskeletal system that works in equal and opposing groups (or pairs) of muscles and maintains a dynamic balance of tension. It’s these components that maintain your posture and drive your movement.
By sitting for hours and hours a day, muscles designed to be in a functional balance begin to shorten (‘strengthen’) or lengthen (‘weaken’) compared to their counterparts. As a result, this interconnected musculoskeletal balance becomes compromised.
Our movements are also the result of multiple muscles contracting and relaxing in coordinated sequences. Once these movement chains contain weakened and dysfunctional links, your body (the clever machine) will automatically re-adjust its muscle recruitment patterns to compensate for these weaker links. Your body adapts to find the most energy-efficient way of executing your most rehearsed movements, whether sitting, carrying a bag on one shoulder, or arching your neck to look down at your phone.
These seem like desirable adaptations, but they’re not. Your body doesn't only consist of muscles; there are tendons, ligaments, bones, organs, lymphatic and nervous systems (to name just a few) that all need functional musculoskeletal support. So, when your body recruits muscles that have evolved for specific uses to help drive other less-suited movements, small muscles start compensating for big muscles, joints lose stability, tendons become overworked, and long before you know it, you have laid the foundations for the majority of your chronic musculoskeletal pain.
That’s not to say you will fall apart as soon as one muscle or joint stops performing at its best—you won’t. Pretty much all of us have a number of minor musculoskeletal problems that are unique to us and our lifestyles, and that’s fine. You can still live a happy, active life, looking and feeling your best without a significant risk of pain or injury.
Problems mainly arise when you have weaknesses in areas with the potential for the highest systemic effects, such as your hips, shoulders, or back. Routine and prolonged sitting often affects these areas most.
Ensuring these keystones are secure and in place is fundamental to establishing the musculoskeletal resilience required to live an active, pain-free lifestyle. That’s not to say you must stop sitting; you don’t. There are many ways to keep checking your posture and simple and practical exercises to help reverse postural deviations before they become a problem.
Check out my other posts to learn how to self-manage your posture and movement habits for the best outcomes.