How Slouching Absolutely CAN Help Cure Back Pain

Have you ever wondered how you should be sitting in a computer chair, if you have problems the lower back on them explain exactly what you should do to make it most comfortable and best to help the health of your lower back.

My name is Dr. David Middaugh. And I’m a specialist physical therapist at El Paso manual physical therapy. And this channel is dedicated to helping people stay healthy, active and mobile while avoiding unnecessary surgery, injections and medications.

I often get asked, what should I do with my chair, how should I adjust my computer chair so that my back doesn’t hurt so much in it. And the answer to this is there’s a few tweaks you can make. But it’s rarely the chair you should be able to sit in virtually any chair. Now there are some really bad chairs out there.

But this chair that I’m sitting in here is probably a more common chair that you’ll see you can get these at any, you know, sort of office supply store, like a Walmart, a warehouse store, anywhere that they sell computer chairs, you’ll find some version of this chair, I can’t tell you the exact brand name of this chair.

It’s actually not even on the chair. But there’s I’ll put a link in the description below on this video, some chairs that I recommend from Amazon, let me tell you exactly what to do. If you’re sitting in any sort of computer chair, you want your feet to be a bit flat on the floor. And you can’t see my feet here, but they’re just completely flat and my knees are bent about 90 degrees here.

It’s okay if your feet move out a bit forward, and they’re not exactly 90 degrees, or if you move them in. The problem here is focusing on one single posture to be in, you can’t be in one single posture all day long. Even if it’s the perfect posture, you’ve got exactly 90 degrees and your feet are just the right angle, you’re going to run into problems eventually our bodies are made to move. They’re designed to have joints and muscles, ligaments tendons, because they’re made to move.

So even if you’re in the perfect posture, your joints aren’t going to like it, your muscles and nerves are going to like it. So plan to move. So what I tell people is this is kind of a good default position, V flat knees about this position 90 degrees, but you can move from there, you can cross your feet if you want, you need to kind of fidget every few minutes, your body will naturally tend to want to do that anyway, just let it happen and adjust your position.

Now as far as your back what you want to do. Ideally, the default posture that you should take when sitting in a chair is actually not using the backrest. So I’m going to turn sideways here my back’s touching the backrest, but coming just off of it a bit. So I’m not touching the backrest. And I’m going to suck in my apps. And I’ve talked about this in other videos, tightening up your abs, but you need to draw in from the lower abdominals.

In order to get a disc this way, your back flat, not art, but flat. And notice what happens on the front side of my body. When I position my ads correctly for my lower back. Remember I said I don’t want you to arc so you shouldn’t be sticking out your chest or raising your shoulders, you actually should do a subtle slouch. When my abs suck in the right way, my shoulders and chest will subtly come down.

But I’m using my abdominal muscles and I can feel my lower abdominal muscles just subtly, we’ll say 10%, zero to 100%. I’m just very mildly engaging them. And I want to be like that. So now I can work on the computer, I can sit and have a conversation with somebody. This should be my default posture.

Now I’m not going to last more than five or 10 minutes like this. I’m not I’m definitely not going to last more than an hour or eight hours like this, if this is the kind of setting that you work in or this is where you tend to be in a in a desk chair. You’re going to be like this for just a few minutes at a time.

And then you’re going to rest and lean on the armrest Are you going to shift your feet in a different position are you lean the other way where you might lean on the backrest too, and give your abs a break. You need to build in that little bit of movement. But then come back to that posture that I’m telling you about where you suck in your abs. Subtle slouch, not sticking out your chest, but just the subtle spots to the fire apps.

The whole slouch thing I often get commented, being a physical therapist or like seriously, you’re telling me to slouch Aren’t you a physical therapist, you should be telling people to have great posture and straighten up their back. But think about it. You’ve got a muscle imbalance in your back. If you’ve got back pain, very likely you have a muscle imbalance.

There are three groups of back muscles that give the back stability. One is your back muscles or run up and down the back. And the other one is your abdominal muscles that wrap around the front, and they attach to the back and then the third group is your hip flexors, which attach on the front of the thighs and they go through the hip into the back of those three muscle groups. abdominals tend to be the weakest and especially sitting down a chair like this.

I’ve pre shortened my hip flexors because I move I’m moving my hips up, and my back muscles are in a position to want to fire. So this puts the hip flexors and the back muscles in a dominant position like this. So you’ve got to fire your abdominal muscles consciously, in order to not allow your hip flexors and your back muscles to dominate the motion and gradually build up a muscle imbalance which compresses those back joints.

And it can feed into this degeneration, disc herniations, arthritis stenosis, all the bad stuff that you hear about in back problems, it is 100% possible for you to work at a desk, you know, 40 hours a week or more, or just sit at the desk at home, if that’s what you like to do, and not have back pain as long as you’re using your abs correctly.

So if you tend to do this motion, where you straighten out by sticking out your chest and raising your shoulders, you should feel your back muscles tighten up to do that, and you won’t feel much in your abdominals. So it’s a quick test to tell if you’re using the wrong muscles.

But when you do this mini slouch sucking your abs, you should feel your abs working and not your back muscles. If you feel like your back muscles fire when you do this, one of two things, you’re either extremely dominant in those back muscles. And you have to take some time to really figure out how to get your dominant muscles to work without wanting to fire the back muscles. Because that’s not a normal thing. or two, you’re just doing this wrong.

Some people will kind of do this but also arch their back at the same time. They’ll slouch but Ark, just stick out their gut, you have to suck in your gut a bit and do a very subtle slouch, just like so. So get those abdominals working. And just answer another question that I commonly get when it comes to chairs is what kind of back support should I use.

And I’m going to show you this chair here, it’s got this built in back support right here, this a lumbar support, which forces your back, if you stick your butt all the way back here and allow the contour of the chair to force your body into that position, it’s going to make you arch your back, which is going to tend to make you shorten or overuse those back muscles. That’s why I’d rather you not lean on the backrest.

Now they sell rolls out they’re like little cylindrical cylinder shaped pillows that you it’s kind of elastic band that you put around and you can put a roll here. If you’re leaning on that, that also makes a curve your back pretty much any device out there that’s designed to go on a computer chair is set up to make you want to curve your back more, which is part of the problem.

And to begin with, you’re not using your abdominals enough and you’re overusing your back muscles, causing you to create a big arc in your back which is putting more pressure on those discs and the joints in your spine on the nerves as well.

So you’ve got to be using your abs to actually get out of a curved back position and flatten your curve so that you can prevent all this bad stuff from happening to your back. Now when it comes to actually using the computer. Let me show you what that’s supposed to look like. I’m tall I’m six foot and two inches.

So I don’t have the meters for that for those of you not in the US are not using the empirical system. But ideally I should be using the armrest. Now when I sit up the way that I’m supposed to my elbow kind of floats over the armrests like this so I have to slouch down to get onto the armrest. Using armrests is fantastic to give your core muscles a little bit of a break. So I actually lean on the desk more because that’s more appropriate for me.

Now you should be able to lean on the desk as long as your desk is sturdy. And you can adjust the seat height you got to play with the position. If your feet don’t touch the floor, if you’re shorter, you just can’t touch the floor.

Think about getting a little stepstool that you can put under there, they still step stools of different heights, you might need just a very short step still, maybe even just a couple of books will work. Or you might need like a six inch step stool, or potentially something more depending on your size.

You can of course adjust the seat height and make it so that it’s appropriate for you. For me at the lowest position on the seat. I’m actually pretty comfortable. And once I’m going to start typing or using the computer, I’m going to brace my abs do a little subtle slouch. And then I’m leaning my arms on the desk for some minor support. It really is minor.

I’m not really leaning hard on it. Although at times because I’m going to fidget I’m going to get out of my good back posture, my default posture, I’m going to lean on it more. So once I am tired here I might actually slouch even more, but I’m putting way more pressure through the desk with my arms. Another common question that I get is should I be using a desktop or a laptop? Is that going to make a difference on my back pain.

It really varies if you are taller than ideally using a desktop or hooking up your laptop to a bigger monitor is ideal. You know all around if you have a desktop or if you tend to hang out with a computer a good amount at home. a bigger screen is better and having one at about eye level right below is good. Like I said I’m tall and I work pretty well off this computer actually have a smaller computer than this before, he is a 13 inch screen, I have an 11 inch screen a long time ago.

And that worked fine off of that as well, I do have a bigger monitor that I connect this to that I work even better off of. But as long as you’re bracing your abs, as a default posture doesn’t have to be constant, you just kind of tend to come back to that, then you should be good regardless of the screen size that you’re on.

I don’t want you to take this information as an excuse to sit all day long, and you still should get up and move around your hips being stuck in this position will definitely influence your back problem. So I would recommend not sitting for more than about 20 to 30 minutes, even if you just stand real quick for 10 to 20 seconds to stretch out or go run to the bathroom or go grab a drink or something to eat.

If it’s that time for you do that frequently, you might even set timers, I’m guilty of getting super duper focused on whatever I’m working on the computer. And I can let hours go by without thinking about getting up. So I will set little timers for myself to just get up and move around. That truly is the best advice for your back pain is frequent movement. It doesn’t need to be hard movement, or aggressive or intense.

You just need to build in some frequent movement. And in that moving you need to have some stability by bracing those abs and not over arching your back if you’re sick and tired of dealing with your back problem and you’re looking to get our help with addressing it so that you’re not living on pain medications or getting injections, and so that you can definitely avoid having a surgery for your back problem.

We’d love to see if we can help you out. The best way to do that is by applying for a complimentary discovery visit, just find the button nearby here might be at the bottom of the page. Once you hit that button, a little formal pop up where you leave us for details. Submit that and our staff will receive that and they’ll give you a call back as quick as possible. To let you know about the next step in applying for your free discovery visit.

A discovery visit is a 20 minute appointment with a specialist physical therapist where we’ll take a good look at your back problem. hear your story want to hear about how the back problem began and what it’s like today so that we can give you a diagnosis in that visit and discuss what treatment would look like in order to solve the problem to avoid surgery and relying on injections and pain medications.

We’ve got limited spots available each month. So don’t wait start applying for that discovery visit so you can get help for your back problem. I wish you the best of luck. Have a wonderful day.