the CRAIG VAN cast
Hey, I’m Craig. I've dedicated more than a decade to understanding the human spine. Now I’m sharing what I’ve learnt. Get started with my SPINE STRENGTH project - Part 1 is free. Subscribe and you’ll receive my work as I release it.
the CRAIG VAN cast
46 | Sitting is worse than you think
Our exploration doesn't stop there. We delve into the negative impacts of prolonged sitting on spinal stability with insights from Professor Stuart McGill's research. Learn about the crucial role our abdominal muscles play in providing stability to the spine and how sitting disrupts optimal human movement patterns, leading to inefficiencies, instability, and injury. It's time to stand up to the hidden perils of a seated lifestyle—we're here to guide you through the complexities of our bodies and the damage our chairs can do.
@craigvandotcom (on all channels)
Website: https://craigvan.com
Twitter: https://twitter.com/craigvandotcom
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/craigvandotcom/?hl=en
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCHJ9dnY6Vj7BVNNCMQ72hbQ
I know you think that sitting is bad for you and I hope you think you sit a lot, but maybe you don't. Either way, I'm here to tell you that sitting is much worse for you than you think, and I'm going to explain how you are also sitting much more than you think. Allow me to explain. Before I do, I want to share a beautiful story that I've written about before that explains how I feel, or what I think it's like to try and share some of these ideas with people.
Speaker 1:David Foster Wallace once said in a speech or he told the story of two young fish swimming along and they happened to meet an older fish swimming the other way who nods at them and says morning boys, how's the water? And the two young fish swim on for a bit and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes what the hell is water? He then went on to say that the point of the fish story is merely that the most obvious, important realities are often the ones that are the hardest to see and talk about. This encapsulates why I think we completely under-appreciate not only the impact of sitting but the pervasiveness of it. It's become so ubiquitous, so omnipresent in our experience that it's hard to think of it as anything but normal. So to truly appreciate the gravity of the situation, the severity of the impact of this phenomenon on our wellness, on our happiness, on our vitality, on our youthfulness, I think it's really difficult for us to appreciate this because it has become our baseline, this is what we perceive as our natural reality. So try and open your mind, try and stretch your perception. Let's really try and consider for a moment that this is bigger and badder than we previously thought. Think about that fish and the water. How does a fish start to appreciate water that is everywhere around it, that has always been everywhere around it, that is transparent and sneakily hiding right in front of him, so present that it's invisible? How do we start to see the water around us and thus learn how to navigate it? So let's talk about sitting.
Speaker 1:The first of the two points I'm going to make is that sitting is worse than you think. Let's really drill down on this before we get into the idea, or before I explain that sitting is more pervasive, that we do more of it than we would like to believe. Now, this is a vast topic and the impact on sitting on our bodies and our minds and our lifestyles and our experience of life is a much vast topic than anyone could cover, probably ever, never mind in a single video. So what we're going to do is we're really going to hone in our focus onto this topic of lower back pain, the central theme and goal of this series and the course that I've been discussing, the kinetic keystone lower back pain. So let's now think about how sitting is worse for us.
Speaker 1:With respect to lower back pain, one of the most misunderstood elements of sitting is its anti-developmental nature. What I believe that a lot of us do not appreciate is that our bodies are continuously, constantly adapting in the direction of the demands that we place on our body. Every single thing that we do acts to shape us from moment to moment towards a certain direction. Our bodies are continuously changing. There is not anything static about the process of the body, and it's good to think about it a bit more as a process than a thing, than a static object. And just because sitting doesn't appear to have the same intensity of stimulus as the familiar exercise session, our body, when exposed to this activity, is being shaped just by virtue of the fact that our body is continuously changing and it relies on its environment to dictate and guide in what direction it needs to change. Unavoidably, sitting becomes this developmental force.
Speaker 1:But if we think about what sitting does for us, where and why sitting even exists? It serves the purpose of giving us the opportunity to be inactive with our bodies while still engaging with some very basic sedentary physical activity. It allows us to essentially forget about our body while engaging with some seated task. It allows our legs to become completely relaxed. We don't need to use them. We mostly support our spine against the backrest, and then even our head and neck tend to follow suit in with the rest of our spine, while our arms and eyes engage with some really menial task in front of us through the lens of physicality. And so the very purpose of sitting is actually to allow us to be supported in a fairly useful posture, but being able to forget about our body because it is so inactive and requires so little awareness input control. It is an anti-movement. It allows us to engage with some simple task while completely disengaging from our movement.
Speaker 1:By definition, sitting is an anti-movement. It exists to allow us to forget and detach from our movement. It exists to give us a useful posture while doing absolutely nothing with our major supporting muscle groups and structures. And, in essence, then, if our body is continuously adapting to this activity, which is actually inactivity, then we need to start sitting as something that is profoundly anti-developmental. And, as I mentioned earlier, just because it does not have the same stimulus as an intense exercise activity, it is still fundamentally changing us. And, because of another consequence of what it does, it allows us to spend vast amounts of time in this posture and, before we know it, we've accumulated far more than enough of this lower grade stimulus to go far beyond the short bursts of the intense stimuli like exercise. So it is profoundly more influential in our development than we like to give it credit for.
Speaker 1:But now let's narrow our focus a little bit. How is sitting in opposition with our spine health? How does it promote the development of lower back pain? Bringing our focus and interest back to the goal and the theme and the focus of this course. Now there are three primary avenues through which I'm going to discuss how sitting is a primary driver of our lower back pain, the first of which is lumbar erosion, or at least a phenomenon or process that I've summarized as lumbar flexion. And, of course, what do I mean by this?
Speaker 1:Let's first consider the natural neutral shape of our spine, consisting of vertebra and intervertebral discs as the primary components, if we think of this neutral posture as the least stress, lowest stress, most comfortable, least irritating posture for all of the structures in the spine, the resting position. And then we consider for a moment what shape our lower back takes when we are sitting with the use of a backrest. When we use a backrest, it's much easier for us to find our lower back in a flexed position or a forward rounded position. And if you consider that when the spine is in its neutral position, the lower back actually has a slightly concave curvature to it. It curves inward slightly and almost all of us, when we sit and we use a backrest, you will find that this lower curvature of the spine is inverted and starts to round outwards or backwards in a convex manner, what we call a kyphosis. The neutral and the natural curve of the lower spine is a lordosis for the technical terms. Now, there's nothing wrong inherently with our lower back, our lumbar spine, flexing forward. This is why it can move, this is why it can bend and rotate. It has these options.
Speaker 1:But when we expose the discs of the lower spine to a flexed position for long periods of time, it starts to put well, stress is accumulated. The discs are dynamic. If you think of when the spine is changing shape, it's not the bones that change shape, but it's largely the discs in between. And if you think of the neutral shape of the spine and then inverting that to the forward flexed lower back position I'm talking about in sitting, then the backside of those discs are going to go from their natural resting position and they have to lengthen on the back, they have to stretch. And the opposite is happening in the front fibres of the discs in the lower back. They go from the natural resting position to a much more compressed and high pressure situation, and this is harmless for short bouts of time, with recovery in between. But when this starts to become a position that we're almost consistently, consistently exposing these discs to, then they start to deteriorate, they start to feel uncomfortable and then what starts to happen is so.
Speaker 1:This is the first order effect. This is the initial strain that's being placed on the lower back. And if you just take any structure in your body as an allergy, if you think of a hamstring muscle or a bicep muscle. All you need to do is take that to the end of its range, give it a nice stretch and hold it there for a few hours and see what it starts to feel like, and then do that for a few days and then a few weeks and see how that muscle starts to respond. And this is what's happening, analogously to the structures of our spine. It's fine to move into these positions, move in and out of them, but when they become a chronic exposure, then we have a problem.
Speaker 1:Then, as a second degree consequence of this, much more impactful and profoundly degenerative on our spine, is the consequence that this, then this rounded position in our lower back, in conjunction with the tight hips we're going to discuss shortly, this rounded position becomes the body's favorite place to bend, to round forward at. If you notice that when you bend over to pick something up from the ground or you are going to even just reach downwards towards the ground every time someone who's never considered this, and especially people with back pain, the vast majority of people with back pain their body's habit is to round forward, to flex, to bend through this area of the lower back, and we should be moving a lot more with our hips. But then you combine the tight hips we're about to discuss with this, almost this compulsion that we develop to round through our lower back, and you have this phenomenon where we're overusing, over, flexing an already strained lower back. Now Professor Stuart McGill, who a lot of this protocol is based on a lot of these ideas and these concepts you can almost think of it as the philosophical base.
Speaker 1:He describes this process as an allergist to how we would break a paperclip. You don't by trying to snap it in one go. You simply bend it back and forth enough times until it essentially breaks on its own. So this is the the kind of process we set in motion when we expose our lower back to the anti-developmental effects of sitting. It's chronically forward-rounded, becoming strained and stressed, and then it becomes a default habit pattern of our lower spine to tend towards rounding forward. And then, when we do that repetitively or under load, it becomes profoundly more stressful on the back. So a lot of people think that when they go and lift up that heavy object and they do something to their disc, that it was lifting the heavy object that caused it for them. And yes, in a superficial sense there's a very direct connection there. But the true cause lies in the sitting that they've probably started in preschool, primary school and the habits they've developed, the way they've primed those structures, like bending that paper clip back and forth until eventually it just takes one more bend, the last straw that literally breaks the camels back.
Speaker 1:Now the second major avenue through which sitting destroys our lower back or leads us towards lower back pain is something called spine instability, and this is very much connected to the first point two sides of the same coin, but I wanted to highlight it on its own because it really does deserve that. Let's think for a moment about what are the healthy mechanics of a lower back? The healthy mechanics are inherently reliant upon the layers and layers of abdominal muscles. If we had to isolate the spine and put it on its own as a stack of discs and bones, it's a very unstable structure and you couldn't visualize it if, on its own, simply collapsing to one or another side. The spinal structures, as we have discussed in the previous videos in this series, rely entirely on the abdominal musculature to provide this structural stability that the spine is capable of, to turn it into a structure that is load bearing. The spine without the core muscles is not load bearing. Yet the function of the spine, the primary function of the spine, is to bear load, and so the spine is nothing without a coordinated and coherent set of abdominal supporting muscles.
Speaker 1:Once again referencing Professor Stuart McGill and his seminal work on the topic low back disorders, he describes the role and what they've discovered in their research and the role that the abdominal muscles play in the structural stability of the spine and how they achieve such a high degree of stability and integrity, when implemented or employed successfully, that it's not just a set of muscles which provide some sort of forced support. No, there's a very sophisticated system of multi-directional layers that complement each other and actually synergize to create far more stability than you would expect from the simple result and tension of the muscles. There is some kind of engineering marvel that is at work. That not is that when the parts, the sum is greater than the parts is. What I'm trying to say is that we cannot explain it purely by the muscular tension, but there is a kind of sophisticated engineering design at work and the analogy he gives it is, and we've got two images in the slide here of the young child with a fishing rod and I will read it to the.
Speaker 1:The spine is an alleges to a fishing rod placed upright with the butt on the ground. When a compressive load is applied downward to the tip, it will buckle quickly and completely. We would never think of a fishing rod as being stable under a compressive load, just like we would imagine applying a compressive load to a spine on its own. However, when we attach guy-wise at different levels of this fishing rod in this image we've got some guy-wise halfway up the fishing rod and then at the tip of the fishing rod attaching guy-wise at different levels and in different directions and, most important, tensioning each guy-wire to the same tension will ensure stability, even with massive compressive loads. Note that the Gaya-wires need not have high tension forces, but that the tensile forces must be of roughly equal magnitude. The tensile forces must be of roughly equal magnitude. This is the role of the musculature in ensuring sufficient spine stability.
Speaker 1:So what is the significance of this? Understanding this Gaya-wire and coordinated, balanced system of forces with equal tension? How does this relate to sitting? Sitting robs us of the coordination because we spend so much time uncoordinated, disconnected from our core. Sitting applies a sort of random shape on our spine and severely deconditions the muscles of our spine, of our abdominal core over time. So we have a completely random, imbalanced and underdeveloped, uncoordinated system of abdominal muscles and we have very little connection to these muscles because we spend the vast majority of our waking hours not supporting our own spine, and I've seen this in patients over and over again.
Speaker 1:The ability any myself in the ability to very precisely control the different layers of the abdominal core, to be able to confidently recruit all of the different layers in equal amounts, without dominating or pre-disposing one group of abdominal muscles to activate more than any other, but to be able to have equal access to all of the layers and I can tell you from sitting many of us develop extremely dormant layers of abdominal muscles. Some of the layers, like the obliques, become extremely difficult to activate because of the kind of atrophy and disconnection that we accumulate through all of the sitting. And then you think of how most people go, trying develop their core, mostly inspired by bodybuilding history and focusing on what we think of the core superficially as our six pack abs. In no way developing the coherent coordination to develop all of the many layers of our core and to recruit them and control them equally, with the spine in an optimized position Sitting robs us of that severely.
Speaker 1:One other way that I have found it valuable to think about what's happening with our spine, our abdominal muscles and our torso at large is that and I've put an image of a naked skeleton in the slide and if you take a look at the lower back region, the only bony structure connecting our pelvis to our rib cage and beyond, or essentially our lower body to our upper body, is this lower spine, the same lower spine I've just described as being extremely unstable on its own. And so this massive void that you can see between the lower border of the rib cage and the upper border of the pelvis, which form a kind of right side up bowl as the pelvis, and an upside down bowl as the rib cage, and if we think of the rims of both of those bowls as being connected by nothing other than our abdominal muscles, that depend entirely on our abdominal muscles to be united, to be connected, and we've discussed this as well in the role that the core plays in our movement. This is one of the integral roles, and so without the our core, which our sitting has left us with a completely inadequate core, we have these two bowls flipping and flopping and relying on a poor lower spine, that is. That can't escape. It's hanging on for dear life, connecting the upper and lower portions of our body, and that's quite an easy image to visualize, akin to the paperclip that's just being taken for the ride, flexing and extending, bending and bending, priming our lower back for dysfunction, deterioration, destruction. Now let's discuss the third avenue through which sitting destroys our lower back and the chance it has for a good life, and this one is slightly less direct, slightly second order compared to the first two avenues we've already discussed, but no less profound and influential in the destruction of our lower back.
Speaker 1:We take a moment to analyze the posture of the body when we are sitting, when we are most frequently seated at the desk or on a couch, the sort of common theme that we see in the shape of the body in these positions. Because why we need to consider the shape of the body is because we are spending so much time in this position, and if we spend a lot of time in any position, our body is going to be changed significantly by that position, and in so doing we can think of chronic sitting or chronic posturing, or being in any position for a long time is going to reinforce that position, is going to lead to a kind of permanence developing in that position, especially if there is the absence of activities and movements which keep us open and keep us that opposed these restricting effects. So when we are sitting we actually have we can think of it as pretty closed hips and pretty closed shoulders. Our hips can be thought of as almost at 90 degrees, our knees are lifted up slightly towards our torso in the way that our upper legs, our thighs, rest horizontally. Over time, this kind of closed hip position, flexed in the front, shortened in the front, is going to become reinforced and it's got the structure there are going to shorten, our hips are going to tighten and if we consider as well that our hips spend the vast majority of that time together, very close to one another, in a position we call adducted Please excuse the slide, I've written abducted there, but it's definitely adducted ADD added that's how I remember Adducted together and we have this closed, flexed position adducted together and that becomes the dominantly reinforced position of our hips.
Speaker 1:Plus, our lives lack a lot of variety, so that becomes the main direction our hips are shaped towards and then, similarly, with our shoulders, our arms are pretty close to our body. Our arms are mostly in front of us, in the slightly forward reaching position, and in so doing, in spending so much time in these specific positions, in the same positions, along with the absence of many other positions and variety, our body becomes specifically adapted towards these specific positions and more and more over time, to the exclusion of other positions. So they become restricted, we become constrained towards a specific setup. Now that means when we try and do things which are outside of these ranges, are expecting more from these joints, it becomes a problem because we are restricted, our movement is restricted at these joints and what we tend to do is is compensate. We still find a way our marvellous body always finds a way to still complete the movements we want to complete.
Speaker 1:But because our hips and shoulders have become constricted, then we start to look for movement elsewhere, especially if we can easily find movement elsewhere. And you might start to have an idea already on the last two points we've discussed and where we would have a bad habit of looking for extra range of motion when we reach, quickly reach the limits of our hips and shoulders, our lower back, unstable and constrained, far too mobile for the stable structure it's supposed to be, quickly raises a tandem that says I don't mind doing a little bit more movement to carry the missing load of the hips and shoulders. We think about moving our hips behind us, our legs behind us. We very quickly reach a moment where our hip mobility is we've reached the end of it and then we start to our child lower back to look for that extra range. We think about reaching for something overhead and very quickly we reach an end of range here. And how do we look for the end? We have to our child lower back, and so, through the restrictions and the constraints that we develop in our hips and shoulders from sitting, we compound this strain and stress on the lower back that we've already discussed is such a big problem. And then it starts to become no surprise that the main victim of sitting is the lower back.
Speaker 1:If you start to look at these different mechanics and forces at play and let's consider for a moment what we've discussed that sitting you shaping us in a direction towards which our spine has very little stability because of the inadequacy of our abdominal and core muscles. We have an excess of mobility in our lower spine as a consequence of this, because of the bad habit of the bad habit of forward flexion that our sitting develops, as well as the lack of stability that leads to our spine flopping, bend and forth in different directions, and then we have this restriction, this lack of movement. So we have this too much movement in our core area, in our spine, not enough stability, whereas in our shoulders we have a loss of movement, we have restrictions, and because of these restrictions, and then how we compensate for those restrictions further increases the required mobility of our spine and core. So we have this loss of movement in our limbs and an increased instability or movement in our spinal core area. This turns out to be the exact opposite of what anyone will learn in a basic introductory course of human biomechanics.
Speaker 1:What is a healthy human movement pattern or paradigm? In a general sense, it's been described as proximal stability with distal mobility. Those are fancy words for saying the exact opposite of what sitting is doing to us. Proximal stability we need stability structure. Proximally close to our center. We need to have stable structures. And then distal mobility as we move away from our center into our limbs. We need mobility when the more movement we can have in our limbs and the more stability we can have in our spine. This turns out to be an optimal direction to move towards when we are training our body's movement. Of course, to more or less degrees depending on the activity, the nature of what we're trying to do, but in a general sense this is a very beneficial movement paradigm to train our bodies towards.
Speaker 1:And we've just discussed that sitting in its anti-developmental nature. Not only is it anti-developmental in some sort of sense of inadequacy, but it is literally the polar opposite of how we understand we should be developing our body for sound movement, for longevity, for athleticism. We have swapped, or sitting is swapping for us. We are moving away from proximal stability towards proximal instability, we are moving away from distal mobility to distal immobility, and that inversion creates such a perversion that we have. Not only are we suffering from the most disabling and depressing injury possible, that the vast majority of adults will experience this, and the numbers are only increasing year on year. Not only are we at risk for that, but you can begin to imagine, I hope, what kind of losses we are experiencing in our movement effectiveness, in our movement efficiency, in the general sense of movement freedom that we have, and how much we are paying for that dearly by developing our bodies in the polar opposite direction that everything we know about human biomechanics tells us to strive towards. Sitting is the anti-movement. In summary, sitting is a structural and dynamic disaster and if it's not a disaster already, it's a disaster waiting to happen.
Speaker 1:As I've shared previously, another framework to understand how profoundly detrimental the impact of sitting is for our movement is through truly reflecting on not just the less significant first-order effects of sitting, but the far more profound, pervasive and perverse second-order effects of sitting. At the first order, we have sitting causing us significant structural and motor deficiencies. We are not developing our structures nearly enough because we've replaced most of our daily activity with sitting theory, anti-development or anti-movement sitting. We're not loading our muscles, we're not loading our tendons, we're not loading our cartilages, all of the connective tissues, our bones. All of that is spending more time without load and without the stimulus to develop than it is spending with time with the stimulus to develop.
Speaker 1:And at the same time, we're spending most of our waking hours mentally and with our attention and awareness disconnected from the the phenomenon that is our body's movement. And, as a consequence, we inevitably become, through our conscious awareness and subconscious, disconnected from our body's movement abilities. We lose the coordination that we would otherwise be developing through much more continuous activity, much more varied activity, much more stimulating activity, much more playful activity, just by engaging with our structures and our movement and its options, more we would become more connected to it. That's what happens the more we do, the more we learn Neurons that fire together, wire together. We make those connections by using those connections, we break those connections by not using those connections, and so on many levels, we lose the motor control, the coordination, the skill to even organize our spine in different positions, to stabilize our joints in different positions, to use our feet on the ground, to feel what it's like, to control our knee and the load. Now we're spending a fraction of time with our knee and the load and the vast majority, for example, of time we are spending with our knee not to under load.
Speaker 1:So, then, when we do expose ourselves to activities dissimilar to sitting, we are far less familiar and capable than we understand. And, like I said, this is very difficult to really appreciate the profundity of this, because we are like the fish in the water, trying to see through the water, trying to see the water, but the water is everywhere and the water is our normal, the water is everything, and so the container of sitting is everywhere and the consequences of sitting are everywhere that we struggle to see ourselves through the lens of not sitting. And we're not even close to understanding what has sitting done to us, because we have no idea and we have nothing to compare it to, because everyone's doing it. It's all we know. It's happening from so early on in our lives, so consistent, so pervasive.
Speaker 1:Alright, but now we take these first order effects, the structural and dynamic or motor deficiencies that develop from movement, which are of course not nice to have, really don't seem like things we want to be developing in ourselves. But then we look at what are the consequences of those, and that's inefficient movement, that's unskillful movement, that's instability, lack of power and a host of undesirable things we would never choose to develop in our bodies. And what is this lead to? These things of course lead to performance losses, inefficient movement, decreased athleticism. But then you combine the inefficient loading of joints, the imbalanced loading of structures, the just general increase of stress, imbalance of stress on structures which are not to develop sufficiently or which are not developed to tolerate loads, never mind inefficient or imbalanced loads and this is going to lead to microscopic breakdown, which we all feel as inflammation and pain initially, and eventually this microscopic breakdown accumulates and becomes a macroscopic breakdown, which is injury, disability.
Speaker 1:Then, as a consequence of all of this, loss of movement ability, movement, which is life, movement, which is the purpose of our body. When we're not engaging with that, then everything that is our body deteriorates, demises and disintegrates. It's not just our muscles and bones that we like to think of as our movement structures, our movement systems, but everything else inside of us, our entire brain, all of our energy and organ systems exist to provide the inputs required to move us through this experience. And when we are not moving through this experience, and the vast majority of our time spent here is in an anti-movement manner, then everything that we are, which serves the purpose of movement, starts to deteriorate, disintegrate and die and we suffer early deaths. There are many years of life that we are paying the price for our seated lifestyles. Now we will continue with the second pillar of this discussion, which is I'm going to show you how we sit, much more than you realize, much more than you would like to believe. But to wrap this up, I hope I've made a fair point of. I've made a clear point in how sitting is so much worse than we believe, than we would like to believe, than we imagine.
Speaker 1:If this information in the series is moving you towards taking action, or you know someone who could really benefit from this and trust me, I know lots of people with back pain in my immediate personal vicinity I know you do too. If it's not you, if the time has come for you to take action, go to CraigVancom, my website. You'll see the banner Karneri Keystone. There's a course. You can get started and make significant change, even with just the free part. I've made sure of that.
Speaker 1:Then, with part two, you can decide to take this seriously and reclaim yourself, your movement self, your vibrant self. Once you have fully implemented and integrated part one, that becomes an option for you. So thank you for watching, thank you for listening, thank you for making it through this. I hope this information serves you on your journey towards yourself, towards your best self. If you know someone who could benefit from this, even just this discussion, share it with them. Do your good deed for the day, help them out. Help me get my message out. Like this video, subscribe. Your future self will thank you. I will make sure to make it worth it more and more over time, and until next time, keep well.