I looked at the health app on my phone this morning and noticed I had taken a pathetic 210 steps yesterday. 210. The daily recommendation is 10,000 (!) and I even take my phone with me when I take the 5-second walk to my toilet.
Whilst some people have used lockdown as the perfect opportunity to get fit, plenty of others (#guilty) have regressed to a slobbish Fresher’s week student, alternating between sitting at a desk kitchen table for work all day before making the treacherous journey to sit on the sofa. It’s a hard life.
Whilst it’s been blissful to be lazy, it’s not doing our health any favours at all.
As Postural Alignment Therapist, Eleanor Burt of Posture Ellie, explains: “Muscles get stronger through increased load and demand. This is a concept we understand well and it’s why so many people spend so much time at the gym lifting increasingly heavier weights. By doing more, they learn to lift heavier.
“On the flip side, when you don’t use your muscles on a regular basis, they atrophy (aka get lazy). This is why many people suffer a whole variety of aches and pains. Their muscles simply aren’t robust enough to hold them in the correct ‘human body shape’ and a varying degrees of biomechanical breakdown occurs over time.”
So when we are sat down all day watching Keeping Up With The Kardashians, guess what’s happening? Your body is still and your muscles are barely working. “You aren’t putting much load and demand through many of the muscles in your body and this isn’t good,” she says.
Ellie explains that if done on a repeated basis (at primary school, University and throughout your working life) your body will start to freeze into this seated shape. Eek. “Some muscles will become overly dominant (they might feel ‘tight’) and other muscles will just totally shut down and forget they exist,” she explains.
Whilst these prolonged bouts of sitting have a very significant impact on the muscles and function of your entire body, Ellie says the most impacted area are the muscles in and around your pelvis.
She explains: “When are sat down, our body is in a position of flexion at different parts of the body (knees bent/flexed, hips bent/flexed and, for most people, the spine rounding forwards/flexed). Whilst we are spending time in flexion, our ‘flexion’ muscles are in control and the ‘extension’ muscles lengthen to allow this movement.
“In the case of being sat down, your hamstrings (knee flexors), your Iliapsaos muscles (hip flexors) and your abdominals (lumbar flexors) are contracted, whilst the quads (knee extensors), glutes (hip extensors) and spinal erectors (lumbar extensors) are chilling and not doing very much.
The muscles that aren’t doing very much soon learn to switch off, which then leaves various parts of the body vulnerable to weakness, pain and injury.”
So, Ellie says if these structurally weak people then decide that going and knocking out a mega HIIT workout or a 10k run is a good idea, they will find themselves with a body simply not able to cope with this type of increased demand. This is exactly the situation I found myself in after attempting to get from couch to 5k recently.
“They structurally don’t have an alignment that allows for it (due to these various weak muscles),” explains Ellie. “If your glutes forget how to work, you’ll collapse somewhat around your pelvis. If your quads forget how to work, you’ll never be able to straighten your knees fully. If your spinal erectors forget how to work, you’ll always have a rounded spine.
None of these are what you want when you are asking a huge demand of your body (most sports and exercise classes) due to the increase in gravity’s impact through all your joints.
“We want to have even distribution of power in all the muscles of our bodies, from front to back and side to side. We don’t want an imbalance because this will lead to pain at some point.”
Panicking about your posture and the impact your lazy habits have been having on your health? Fear not, Ellie says that none of this is meant to be ‘doom and gloom’; it’s just stating the facts so we understand what we need to do to help ourselves. “Thankfully the human body is incredibly adaptable and, within a very short space of time, someone can make an enormous difference in how well their body and muscles function,” she assures.
“The way in which we combat this is by trying to even out the demand on our body and do less of the positions/movements that we do most of the time aka move more and differently.”
If you have spent a large portion of time during the day with your body in hip flexion (to put it simply, with your glutes not doing much / sitting on your a***), you need to focus on spending an increasing amount of time in hip extension. “This same logic can be applied with every single joint in the body, even down to the fingers. Hands clawed over a keyboard all day? Stretch them out the other way a number of times a day too!”
Ellie says that moving more does not mean aggressive, high intensity workouts (especially if you have a wonky, stiff body). “Gentle movement is a great place to start simply teaching your joints how to move better and how to re-educate them to work in synchronisation with one another (like they would have done when you were a toddler and hadn’t spent most of the day sat down).”
Keen to make a start? Ellie says gentle yoga is the best and most accessible place for most people to start as it is routinely taking your joints through unusual ranges of motion and will test your muscles differently to your day job. “Take this slowly, as it will take a while for your body to unwind itself from its old version of ‘normal’ and there’s no benefit to doing things you aren’t capable of performing well.
“Be patient but change can begin to happen surprisingly quickly.”
Posture Ellie is a Postural Alignment Therapist (www.posture-ellie.com) and has a whole variety of videos and routines over on her YouTube, which will help you in kick-starting your body’s ability to move more functionally and to switch on those sleepy desk job muscles!