Sit Right - Most Seats Can Make Your Back And Neck Pain Worse

New discoveries in how to sit can ease your pain.

This information on sitting positions is so critical that MOST people getting structural correction for old injuries WILL NOT FEEL BETTER until they learn to sit correctly.

What you are about to read will sound like the cliché of a nagging mother saying "sit up straight!"

Your mother was not totally wrong!

You do need to sit up straight. But, what she didn’t know was that in most chairs, sofas, cars, and planes you cannot sit up straight without a bunch of effort.

In fact, sofas and recliners are made to slump in - so you slump. Car seats and other chairs just make you slump unintentionally. In either case -- because you are slumped -- your body is put under a lot of pressure in certain areas. This can cause you pain. You might feel discomfort while you are sitting, but often NOT until a few hours later.

You can often see the adverse effects of sitting slumped simply because it is harder to get out of the seat you are in. Have you ever struggled to get up off of a sofa or a recliner? This is why.

Slumping in your seat also explains why people get fatigued and achy after driving for a distance or flying in an airplane. In this slumped position the muscles in your body are working harder and using more energy. Your body also has to twist around to shift the pressure off of injuries. This makes you fatigued, achy or causes pain in those areas.

Body Mechanics of Slumping When You Sit

When you sit with your hips lower than your knees your pelvis tilts backward and your body slumps. This pelvic tilt leads to your lower back arching backward and your upper back and neck compensating by arching forward. This pushes your upper back and lower neck areas forward into a direction where there are NO muscles behind them to pull them back into place.

This is an injury!!!

This mechanism of slumping is responsible for a variety of painful areas. One person might get lower back pain while another might get neck pain or headaches. Other areas can be stressed as well. Wherever your body can use muscles to compensate and shift the stress off of the parts that went forward, it will use them and can cause pain there.

Test It For Yourself

Proper sitting posture is so important that I teach it to all of my patients as soon as they begin treatment. Often, they will not feel better very long after I work on them unless they sit correctly between visits.

How does it feel when you are sitting right? It takes no effort. Your entire body just wants so to stay upright naturally and easily.

You should test these sitting ideas for yourself to see if they are true for you. Try sitting the way we suggest with your hips a bit above your knees. Use a book or towels on a chair to get your hips up a bit. Feel how upright you are. Just let your body go loose and see if you slump forward. Then, take out whatever you were sitting on and see if you slump and notice if it takes more effort to sit there.

Now, try the ideas presented in this report for a few weeks. After awhile, you will feel so comfortable sitting this way that you will notice anytime you sit incorrectly.

Where Can You Sit?

I know that you want to be able to sit anywhere and NOT have it cause you any problems. This may not be possible. Very few places we sit are built with correct structural posture in mind. Sofas, recliners, cars, airplanes are all build LOWER IN THE BACK.

Sitting in restaurant booths, movie theater seats, and sitting up in bed – are pretty much going to cause your body to slump. You can fix SOME of them with the The Sit EZ Orthopedic Support Seat from EZ Posture Products but not all. The ones you can’t fix will bother you no matter how you try to fix them. For example; I have not seen anyone be able to sit up in bed and not have it affect them.

The standard for building chairs is to have the back of the seat one inch lower than the front. Chairs do vary some from this but seldom do you find one that is built up enough in back to be level (ideally above level).

Even many office chairs, with all of the bells and whistles they have for making adjustments, generally have flaws. The shape of the seat, sometimes made like a saddle, is hard to sit properly on. This is especially true when you cannot adjust the height of your hips to be higher than your knees. The Sit EZ Orthopedic Support Seat will work on most office chairs but you can also try just folding up a towel like a wedge to place in the middle.

Here is more information on sitting in car seats. The best position in your car is to be sitting on the The Sit EZ Orthopedic Support Seat , WITHOUT any lower back support (if your car has an adjustable lumbar support then back it out), and with your seat in an upright position.

As for sofas and recliners, I have not seen anyone with back or neck problems that can sit on one and get away with it. This bears repeating: sofas and recliners are made to slump in. I have tried many ways to fix them but have NOT been successful.

The same goes for propping yourself up in bed to read or watch TV. I recommend lying on your side with your head propped up above level if you want to do these in bed.