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
59 | How Sitting Wreaks Havoc on Your Body (and How to Fix It)
In this episode, you'll understand the two main consequences of prolonged sitting: spinal instability and limb immobility, and why they're so detrimental to your overall health and movement quality.
We break down the complex anatomy of your spine, explaining how sitting affects its structures, from buckling joints to stress concentrations in your discs. Learn why your office chair might be your worst enemy and how it's slowly eroding your body's natural support systems.
But it's not all doom and gloom! We also discuss the path forward, introducing the concepts of spine stability and limb mobility as your weapons against the sitting epidemic. Discover how you can start reversing the damage and reclaim your body's natural movement potential.
Whether you're struggling with back pain, concerned about your sedentary lifestyle, or simply want to move better, this episode is packed with valuable insights that could change your approach to daily movement.
Don't miss out on this crucial information that could be the key to unlocking your body's hidden potential and freeing yourself from the shackles of sitting.
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Beyond the obvious stress and discomfort that sitting causes, there is a much bigger threat to our freedom and vitality lurking. If every movement and every activity shapes us, then our time spent sitting has deeply ingrained the chair into our body. Our tissues and structures have been loaded unnaturally for unimaginably massive amounts of time. Weakness, tightness and disconnection must follow. And because sitting is by design an anti-movement, our coordination of and connection with our body has been destroyed. I promise you a chair's tentacles reach much further than you realize. Yes, sitting stresses the structures of our spine and pain across our back is unavoidable. But but the real danger is much less direct, much more insidious. In fact, our bodies have been accumulating the consequences of sitting ever since we were propped up at the adult table in a baby chair. Then these effects have really cemented themselves in through our developmental years and have since become a part of our body's normal. These changes from sitting have become so deeply ingrained that they need deliberate and focused efforts to unravel their stubborn knots. Some of the changes from sitting are self-reinforcing habit loops. So even if we could remove sitting altogether, we would still continue to reinforce these bad habits throughout the rest of our day when we are not sitting. If we seriously want to experience our body free from the impact of sitting, we need to do a lot more than sit less and sit better. We need to figure out how to reverse a lifetime of sitting. This is the goal of our dedicated corrective movement practice, where we use movement to reverse and restore our ability to move. But to know what movement, we need to understand how we have changed from sitting. What has it done to us over all these years?
Speaker 1:I think of the physical consequences of sitting in two main buckets Spinal instability and limb immobility. An unstable spine and immobile limbs. If you remember, this is the inverse, the direct opposite of what biomechanists broadly consider the foundation of healthy and athletic movement, which is a stable spine and mobile limbs, with spine stability and limb mobility. A stable spine with mobile limbs is considered an effective foundation of movement for most people, starting in the center, at our spine. Sitting me sitting quietly strips away our spinal stability. We're all losing the skill and the habit of keeping our spine supported. An unsupported spine, as you will soon learn, deteriorates much quicker than a stable one much quicker than a stable one. Our spine support, including our core and back musculature, must deteriorate if they are left unused so much of the time, which is what is happening when we are sitting. Use it or lose it. Neurons that fire together, wire together those that don't won't wired together those that don't won't. These unused muscles and neural pathways must dissolve away. We lose the skill, the very ability to deliberately support our own spine, and the habit to automatically and unconsciously support our spine is disposed of day by day, decade after decade. An unsupported spine is worthless. It's like removing the leg from a tripod. Essentially, there is nothing left.
Speaker 1:A spine which is unsupported or inappropriately supported by its core world buckle to the limits of its joints and connective tissues. On its own, the spine is an unstable stack of bones held together from completely falling apart by a family of incredibly strong connective tissues. The spine is made up of vertebral bones. Connecting these vertebrae or vertebral bones are joints made up of intervertebral discs and ligaments. If a spine were naked of its muscles and were stood upright with only its connective tissues to support it, it would flop over like a noodle all the way to the limits of its connective tissues. These limits are the primary function of the connective tissues, allowing enough space for movement but forming a strict container. The discs are designed to act as hydraulic cushions to allow and withstand compressive forces, while our ligaments keep our bones fixed in relation to one another. As a side note, the spine has 24 joints allowing movement across three curvatures three spinal curvatures the neck, the upper back and lower back Curvatures, which allow our spine to respond like a shock absorber. Among other functions, the system of muscles which support our spine operate like a guide wire system, stabilizing and distributing loads in many directions and across many structures. However, when this system of muscles does not operate properly, usually because of poor coordination and laziness, our spine will collapse to its limits, limits set by the connective tissues, the ligaments and the discs. Now our discs are well designed to tolerate loading, but within their safe range. Then they can tolerate these loads for a lifetime, but loading them at or near their limits is not nearly as sustainable.
Speaker 1:Discs have a gel cushion center with a strong fibrous ring around the cushion. In mid-ranges, in comfortable ranges of the joint's motion ranges of the joint's motion the spinal loads compress the cushions and the cushions dissipate these forces outwards into the fibrous ring around it. But when a vertebral joint is at the end of its range, the compressive load bypasses the cushion in the center and directly compresses or stretches the fibrous ring around the cushion, compressing the ring on the short side of the buckling joint and stretching the ring on the long side of the buckling joint. This fibrous ring around the cushion is designed to withstand humongous loads from the cushion within it, but it does not tolerate the direct compression and tensile loads from above and below very well.
Speaker 1:When the joints of our spine buckle, the load is transferred from the global system to a local, very specific connective tissue structure, diffused to concentrated, and not only concentrated, but concentrated on a structure in a way that is tolerated much less sustainably than when it is loaded optimally. But fortunately, our connective tissues are extremely resilient. Right, they are resilient enough for a few lifetimes if they are used in alignment with their design. But if we stress them in inefficient ways, then they may only withstand the first several thousand or tens of thousands of insults, but not year after year for decades with little to no opportunity to recover. Remember, our spine is at the center of all of our movement and the main movement function of our spine is to bear load. In fact, unless we are lying down horizontally, our spine must bear the load of our body. That means that any bad habit our spine has when it bears load will be present continuously because our spine is continuously under load. Be present continuously because our spine is continuously under load. In other words, if the joints of our spine tend to buckle under load and our spine is constantly under load, then our spine's joints must buckle to the end of their ranges constantly, constantly, in turn transferring the loads to our connective tissues and joints constantly. On top of this, we know that the discs of our spine tolerate loads much less sustainably when they are buckled versus when they are supported, because of these excess stresses that are placed on the rings, the fibrous rings of the discs when the joint buckles.
Speaker 1:This constant stress on the joints and connective tissues of our spine is where the real danger is hiding. Most modern sitters are alternating their lower back's shape from buckled in flexion to buckled in extension, from buckled in a forward bent position to buckled in a backward bent position, essentially flip-flopping like a noodle between two extremes with very little time being supported in between. Professor Stuart McGill likens this back and forth bucking to the way you break a paper clip. You stand no chance trying to snap a fresh clip, but bend it back and forth enough times and it will eventually snap on its own. But don't be fooled by all this talk of spinal breakdown and deterioration.
Speaker 1:Our spine is actually extremely tough, and rightly. It houses and supports some of our most precious parts. In fact, it is so strong that the forces required to injure a completely healthy spine in one sweep, in one motion, in one situation must be in the range of the kinds of forces experienced in car accidents or when falling from a height of a few stories. Our spinal structures are extremely tough, but with enough patience even a rock will be cut in half by the persistent stream of water. The consistent and accumulating effects of sitting will eventually wreak havoc on even the most resilient structures. The relentless onslaught of microtrauma, combined with insufficient recovery, primes our spines for drama. So no, it's not one final straw that breaks the camel's back, it's all the straws together. It's not that one heavy deadlift or that one unlucky sneeze that's burst your discs, it's all the reps of all the years combined together. One of the most important contributions that Professor Stuart McGill has made to my understanding of lower back disorders and to my understanding of injuries in general is this understanding that it is the accumulative insult that produces most of the structural breakdown, not one-off events.
Speaker 1:Behind all back injuries lies a long chain of harmful movements. Poor spine movement is the cause of spine instability. Therefore, the killer beast we must slay to restore order in the spinal kingdom is spinal instability and poor spinal movement. But before we dive headfirst into this fight, we must know that this beast has a powerful sidekick. While we sit on the chair, seduced by the backrest, its tentacles wrap around our limbs. At first we don't notice, but at some point, suddenly, we cannot escape their grip. How does this happen? Let's start with our hips, and then we can discuss the shoulders In our lower body.
Speaker 1:When we sit, our hips flex to roughly a square angle, our knees follow suit and our legs stay fairly close to one another the whole time. Now, there is nothing inherently wrong with these positions. But when we overuse them and underuse the rest of our possibilities, our limbs begin to develop a bias towards these positions and this bias becomes reflected in the structures themselves. Our physical development must follow the reality of our activity. Our physical development must follow the reality of our activity. If our limbs are flexed in positions most of the time, they will develop towards flexion. If our limbs do not spend much time in other positions, they will develop away from those positions.
Speaker 1:Chronically, flexing our hips leads to shortening and tightening over the front of them and weakening and wasting over their back, forcing our reliance on the front and creating difficulty in accessing the back. This imbalance, referred to as lower cross syndrome by a therapist, is a rotten root at the core of many modern issues Concerning lower back pain. This hip imbalance forces our body to compensate for the lost power and mobility, causing us to overuse the joints just above and below our hips, which happens to be our lower back and our knees. Therefore, we use our spines to produce movement, which should be coming from our hips, and where our hips have lost range of motion, we just ask our lower back to make up for it. Then, when it comes to our upper body, when we are sitting, we are constantly reaching forward with our arms and rounding our upper back and shoulders forward. This leads to a shoulder that is tightened and restricted into the forward rounded positions, tight over the front and weak and wasted over the back. The result is similar to our lower body we deteriorate in some areas and overdevelop in others. We lose the functions of some important muscles and we lose critical ranges of motion too.
Speaker 1:Therapists have called the changes around our shoulder, neck and upper back from sitting upper cross syndrome. So we have lower cross syndrome at our hips and upper cross syndrome at our upper spine and shoulders. The result is pain and injury in our spine and arms. Having forward rounded shoulders puts much more stress on our neck because the full weight of our arms is not supported by the muscles in the back of our shoulder and upper back. Instead, it hangs from our neck instead of also being supported by your upper back muscles, which are now weakened, deactivated, atrophied. Our upper back eventually screams from pain after years of being stretched all day, every day, slouched under load, and we should expect any muscle burdened with load, stretched to full length all day, every day, to eventually scream at us. We should expect this.
Speaker 1:Tight shoulders, then, also lead to an over-reliance on our lower back. We make up for the missing range of motion in our shoulders. Think about reaching upwards or behind you. Most of us just bend our spine to make this possible. We cannot reach overhead or behind us and maintain a neutral and stable spine. We've just lost that option.
Speaker 1:So where to from here? It should be clear that sitting is not merely theoretically toxic, moving us conceptually in the opposite direction as an athlete's ideal, which would be a stable spine and mobile limbs. The real consequences of the chair are outright inhumane. We don't make people work in asbestos-filled factories anymore, and one day we will also look back at the stupidity of spending so much time sitting, especially with the absence of any remedy for that. So spine stability and limb mobility are our priorities, our main weapons in the battle against the arch enemy of our freedom of movement. It is through these two doors, the stable spine and mobile limbs, that we can leave the shackles of the chair behind and taste the sweet nectar of movement freedom again. But what does that look like?
Speaker 1:Spine stability and limb mobility are just concepts that we've discussed. What do they actually point towards? We need spine stability to keep our spine safely supported and protected, to stabilize and support our spine through all of our movement, and we need enough limb mobility, at a minimum, to avoid compromising and compensating our spine with our spine, compromising our spine and compensating with our spine. By understanding how our spine and its support systems work, we can put together a movement plan that makes the most of these insights, aiming for a spine that's as stable as it can possibly be A real, marvelous example of the engineering and beauty that is our human body Finding our spine stability, creating our spine stability, is like discovering our body's main support beam. Combine it with the perfect mix of strength and flexibility and we can start to remember what it feels like to move well and feel great. Spine stability, when developed, is a mechanical miracle of our body, of the human body, genius in function and gorgeous in form. Spine stability proper is our kinetic keystone, the key to all of our movement.
Speaker 1:Now, if you are still here listening to me, that probably means you've found some value. If, yes, there's plenty more to explore and plenty more to come. You know what to do. If you want in on that, if you're ready to dive deeper now, deeper into this project, go to my website, craigvancom, and get stuck into the Kinetic Keystone Projects course, where I've laid out all of the pieces and parts in a structured and easy to follow way, and it's free. If you know someone who could benefit from this information or should tune into this conversation, make a positive impact in their day, it's a simple act of kindness Share it with them. For those who prefer different formats. Remember I release content both as video on youtube and as audio only on my podcast, the craig van cast. Otherwise until next time.