As an Osteopath I see a lot of people that are suffering from movement issues that are related to their daily movement habits or lack of them. You may well be one of those patients that I have asked, if you sit with your legs on the couch up and to the left? Quite often I’m right, because I can see that pattern in the curve of people’s spines. The general consensus of the scientific community seems to be that posture and pain are not directly related.
I accept that there is some truth in that idea to a point, but what is statistically true for the majority of the population may not be true for you as an individual. My beliefs are affected by the what I see in clinic, which by its nature is a self-selecting sub group and does not necessarily represent the whole of society. The reality is my patients don’t really care about the whole of society they just want to get better. I am always keen to give patients the information that they can use to make the changes that are going to keep them more active and out of pain. One of the statements I often casually make is that modern life does not contain enough daily movement and that we have to go out of our way to give our bodies the movement nutrition that it needs. But how much movement do we need? and how much movement did we get in the past? How much do people living in the past actually sit? These questions are hard to answer as we can’t time travel but there are some populations of people that still live in very traditional ways. These hunter gatherer societies represent the longest extant examples of traditional societies, how we used to live before ‘modern life . Tribes such as the Hadza and Kalahari San’ have been studied for many years their movement practices are outlined in the book ‘Exercised’ by Daniel Libermann. He makes the point that hunter gatherers are only active for about three hours a day and they may be sitting for as much as three hours a day. But when they sit, they don’t do it for very long, they don’t sit in comfortable chairs and they are quite often engaged in other activities.
This means that their sitting is very different, they are usually ground sitting and so shift and move their position to stay comfortable. They maybe conversing or carrying our small tasks as they sit, but they do not spend large periods of their day not moving while they are engaged in metal tasks as one would be on a computer or while watching TV. It seems to be both the length of time that we sit at work combined with how little we are moving at home that is detrimental to us. This is impart due to the accumulation of inflammation that can occur in the inactive, but also the opportunity cost of not retaining muscle mass that means that our sitting time has a more detrimental effect as we age.