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Two weeks ago, we talked about the negative effects of sitting on your lower back and your knees. Well, after your knees and your back, what is the next most common area for joint problems?
That’s right, the shoulder. (And we’ll include the neck in this, because they are intimately connected.)
Remember our rule of adaptation. Our bodies adapt to the stresses that we place on them. Does this photo look familiar?
In this position — and many sitting postures like it — our upper backs are excessively rounded, our shoulders are forward and our necks are in a forward and extended position.
Often, we are in this bad position when seated and for hours at a time. With the advent of handheld devices, we can now stand and even walk while maintaining poor posture in our neck and shoulders.
Hopefully (since you’re reading about it) you are now sitting tall with your shoulders back and your head in a neutral position. If so, go ahead and go back to letting your shoulders round, and your upper-back hunch.
Now, stick your head forward like you are trying to read letters that are too small on your screen. Raise your arm as high as you can. Not very high, right? Maybe you even feel tightness or pinching in the back of your shoulder.
As our bodies adapt to the poor postures of our technology and screen-driven culture, we lose range of motion at our shoulders. Meanwhile, the daily activities of life still demand that we get our arms over our heads.
We put our carry-ons in overhead bins. We reach up into a cabinet to get a coffee mug. We lift our kids up to the monkey bars. We throw baseballs to our grandchildren. We serve tennis balls. And then, one day we find out that we have a torn rotator cuff, or impingement, or a torn labrum, or bursitis, or tendonitis or something else that keeps us from doing what we used to be able to do.
Here is what you can do to start to correct your posture and avoid or alleviate shoulder and neck problems:
1. Adjust your computer work station: Here are OSHA’s guidelines. Also, make sure that your screen resolution and font size are clear and big enough that you are not craning your neck forward in order to see the screen.
2. Text better: Just like with your computer work station, when you text, the top of your screen should be at eye-level and your shoulders should be down and back with your elbows by your side. Here is a great link to a video by position-guru, Kelly Starrett.
3. Get your eyes checked: Sometimes, poor posture and neck pain can simply be caused by craning your neck to try to see things better. Let glasses or contacts do the job instead of wearing out your neck muscles.
4. Stop benching so much, Bro!: Yes, this one is directed to the guys reading this. The No. 1 question we get asked by guys in the gym is, “How do I make my chest bigger?” The second question usually is “How do I increase my bench press?”
A follow-up statement by the same guy typically is something like, “I used to bench a lot more until my shoulders starting hurting.”
Guys (and I’ve been guilty of it too) spend too much time in the gym working on the muscles that we see in the bathroom mirror — not the full- length mirror. But given that your shoulders and chest muscles are already short and tight from the 10-14 hours per day that you spend in poor posture, doing exercises that are going to shorten and tighten them even more is only going to accelerate the shoulder injury.
Instead, do twice as many exercises or sets for your upper back muscles (lats, rhomboids, middle and lower trapezius) than you do for your chest and shoulders. And be sure to keep your shoulders down and back and squeeze your shoulder blades together at the end of each rep.
5. Ladies, no more “half push-ups”: Push-ups are a great exercise for upper body strength and core strength. But if you can’t get full range of motion (chest to the ground) then you are making your chest and shoulder muscles shorter and tighter, exacerbating the “shoulder- forward” position that we are trying to avoid.
If you cannot maintain your posture and get all the way down on a regular push- up, try putting your hands on a bench or an elevated bar (the Smith Machine is great for this because you can adjust the height as you get stronger). Or, as an alternative, you can do dumbbell chest presses laying on a bench or stability ball.
6. Stretch your chest and the front of your shoulders regularly. The best time to do it is at the end of a workout. Or you can stand in a doorway with your arms out to your sides against the door frame. Keeping your arms against the door frame, step forward through the door to stretch your chest and the front of your shoulders.
7. Be Mindful: Be aware of how you sit or stand. After you correct yourself enough times, it will eventually become ingrained in your body’s motor program.
8. Free your Mind: You know the saying, “Free your mind, and your traps will follow,” or something like that. Many of us carry tension in our neck and upper backs due to stress. So that neck or shoulder pain may be more related to lifestyle and stress-management than posture. Find ways to relax every day. It can be yoga, a massage, a 15-minute walk, listening to music, meditating or something else. But try to unplug and decompress daily.
Now stand up, straighten up, pull your shoulders back, pull your chin back and take a deep breath. See you in two weeks!
In our next column, we will answer health and fitness questions submitted by YOU, our BethesdaNow readers. Please send your questions to info@fitnesswise.net.
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