Back injuries for office workers and any sort of job that requires you to sit for a prolonged period of time such as being a teacher, delivery driver, or any other desk jockey position are some of the most prominent cases in the “professional sitter” career. Back muscle weaknesses in the desk jockey professions that lead to injury and discomfort and lack of performance in general throughout someone’s everyday life activities during their job. Often, back injuries are caused by static positions where the orientation of the muscles are lined up for a long time sitting in a certain position. For example, sitting for 1-2 hours at a time. Not only can sitting in a certain position for a prolonged period of time encourage the likelihood of an individual forgetting to line themselves up in the correct posture, but also bad habits will start to form that will carry you through other activities during an individual’s day. This will increase the likelihood of back injuries occurring for the desk worker population.
One way to counter this is to focus on local muscular endurance of the supporting back muscles of the spine. Sometimes it’s the lack of muscular endurance that the back has that will lead to atrophy of the back muscles and then cause a detrimental shift in the person’s posture, leading to back injury and pain. Therefore, a simple solution would be to work on some exercises that are not in the vertical sitting position that will help improve endurance of the back muscles.
A great example of this is a version of the plank exercise. Either a straight-arm plank or a standard elbow plank being executed for 30 seconds once a day for three times a week will significantly help the muscular endurance of the back muscles.
So, a good solution to is not only reminding yourself to maintain proper posture throughout the day, but also implement an exercise that exposes some of these weaknesses in your back and your posture. One of these exercises that will make you feel sensations of muscular engagements of some of the areas that is the simple plank exercise.
It’s very important to make sure that you have correct posture while you’re sitting. Ensuring that your shoulder blades are over your hips and your ears are in line with your spine are a great place to start. Albeit, there may be a lot of other things to address… but we want to start out very lightly and fix some problems that may be starting from years of putting your body in a certain shape that is not necessarily beneficial to the longevity of your back.
Once again, a simple solution that involves exercise to increase a muscular endurance of your back is the plank exercise. Maybe perform 15, 20, 25, to 30 seconds of plank once a day for just three times a week. Practicing this maintenance routine will not only help the muscular endurance of your back but will also help to ensure that you have a maintenance routine inline that will encourage the mindset of maintaining Lifetime Fitness!
If you aren’t sure about how to perform the plank exercise, follow along with this video and learn!
