 and welcome to my new improved show, Physical Therapy for a Better Life. I'm your host, Christine Lenders, Physical Therapy Specialist. This new show is inspired by the past 18 months of life changes during this pandemic. It's a lifestyle show designed to bring you the best tips, strategies, and movements to help achieve less pain, optimal performance, and a better life, all from the comfort of your home. These top tips will come from myself in addition to other health practitioners in Hawaii and all around the world. Here's a few words from our CEO, Jay Fidale, to launch the show. Hello, I'm Jay Fidale of Think Tech, Hawaii. Christine Lenders' show, Movement Matters, has changed its name to Physical Therapy for Better Living. And it's not just a name change, it's a concept change too. Fact is that COVID has changed the way we live, and lots of us have been largely indoors for the past two years. Many, many of us have become isolated and sedentary, and we all know that's not good for your health, not in the US or anywhere. Of course, being isolated and sedentary leads us to weight gain and the many things that follow from that. And being isolated and sedentary leads to other things too, musculoskeletal things, things a physical therapist can help you with. That's why Physical Therapy for a Better Life is a great name and a great beat after these two years. Christine's coverage is more important, more relevant than ever. So for a better life, take a look at her show. It broadcasts at 11 a.m. on alternate Tuesdays on ThinkTech, Hawaii.com. Mahalo. There it is in a nutshell. Thank you so much, Jay, for joining us for that. Now today, we're going to discuss the impact sitting and working from home have had on your body and your health. Now, I remember when I was living in New York City, there was statistics all about sitting as the new cancer, sitting as the new heart disease. And what they were saying at that time was that there wasn't enough spin classes, HIIT workouts, those high-intensity workouts, cardio workouts that you could do to undo the damage that eight hours of sitting had done on your body. Now over the years, there's been some conflicting research and they're trying to really look at some of the reasons why sitting has become so harmful to our body. Not just sitting, driving in your car or sitting down for an hour or two meal, but sitting continuously for eight hours a day. So let me ask you, have the last two years of increased time sitting changed your life? Do you have pain? Have you gained weight? Are you having trouble sleeping? Those are just some things that long time sitting can have an impact on your body. Also, you might have neck pain, eye strain, shoulder pain. I also want to know, how would you rate your sitting posture? This is a question I ask patients in the office all the time and in my family. And most people tend to either say, I'm really good with my sitting posture or I'm the worst at my sitting posture. Now this isn't something to slap your hand on or give yourself a bad rating on. It's more something I just want to call your awareness to because the people that said I sit great tended to be slouching forward. And I want you to look at image number one to see if this is you. This is just a picture of somebody crossing their legs. You know, you could be crossing your legs on the sofa. You could be crossing your legs sitting at your desk. You could be crossing your legs watching TV or in a movie. And I drew those lines to show that's what happens to your spine when you cross your legs. There I was crossing my legs. Now, if we go to video image number two, you'll see in this image, this is just me sitting relaxed in a chair, trying to show where you may think that's good posture because you're supported on the back of the chair, but your spine is completely rounded and your head is forward of the central axis of your spine. Let's go to image number three, where we also see now the spine is in a good position. So great job me, but then my head is looking down at my phone. It could be looking down at a laptop. It could be looking down at a book or something like that. So to fix it all, let's go to image number four, where you can see now, okay, my head is over my shoulders. I'm supported on the chair and I'm supporting my elbow to look at my phone or whatever I'm reading at the time, if I'm FaceTiming someone, if I'm doing a WhatsApp or any kind of video with my family, friends, since we haven't all been to get together in a long time now. So let's go to the next image and we will see how you would work on your laptop. I also have shown that there is a pillow placed behind my back. I've scooted my buttocks all the way back against the chair and placed a pillow there. And why I'm showing you this video is because this is a great way to modify your kitchen chair. This is a great way to modify your sofa. This is a great way to modify a home desk chair that maybe doesn't have the fancy art support in your back. You want to be able to have the best support for your spine. You want to be in proper alignment to avoid injuries to your neck or your shoulder or your back. And I did have just a little picture card on my lap there. But if you are using a laptop or reading a book, you can just grab another pillow and prop that on your lap so that whatever you're reading is closer to your face. And one thing in that photo that you can see too is my head is not bending down to the device like this. I am just nodding my chin down and gazing my eyes down so I'm maintaining the optimal posture. So I also had, in addition to Jay, the benefit of getting a quote from a physical therapist, I was asking him what has he seen over the pandemic? Has things changed during his practice? This is from Christopher Krug at Krugpt.com. And he said, quote, during the COVID-19 pandemic, many people have fortunately been able to continue working remotely from home. Although this is a blessing as far as finances and safety, I've seen an increase in the number of people coming into our physical therapy clinic with neck and back pain related to poor posture. Sitting for hours in a kitchen chair with your laptop on the table is not easy on the body compared to using an appropriate office chair with a desktop and a keyboard tray. However, there are some simple ways that you can make adjustments to your homework station. Combining better ergonomics with a few exercises, you can get rid of or avoid chronic neck and back pain while you work from home. Close quote. Now thank you, Chris Krug for offering that insight to all of us here. And let's go to video number two, video number six, where we can see a little bit about how to correct that. In order to decrease the stresses on your body that prolonged sitting has on you, you want to do a couple of exercises. They're so simple. You don't need any equipment. You can do it from your home. You can grab a broomstick or something, put your hands up over your head, suck your stomach in and stand up and then come down. Stand up and then come down. If you can't put your arms up over your head, you can put it on your chest up, down, suck your stomach in. If you want to stretch, you could put it behind your shoulder blades here, suck your stomach in, lean forward, up and down. This takes care of all your vital organs. If you catch yourself sitting too long, you can also do simple movement and just march in place. You march in place for 30 seconds. It'll give you better mental clarity while you're working. It'll give you that break to be fresh and work. You can also just do a couple of mini squats in place. Suck your stomach in, mini squats. If you want to make it postural, you can put your hands behind your head and squeeze back. Another thing you can do, if you don't want to exercise, but you just caught yourself slouching at home, you're hunching forward and you said, oh my gosh, I need to breathe and let my diaphragm give me that gastric motility. Breathe and open up my chest. You can just walk over to any wall. Walk your hands right up the wall. Stretch everything out on the front and then breathe in deep. Lock your hands up and breathe. If you have shoulder pain, you could just kind of put your hands on the glass here, lean into the wall of your chest and breathe and open everything up. And you can also, if you're sitting and you just can't break away and you just have a few seconds, you could sit in your chair, clasp your hands behind your head and neck and just squeeze your elbows back and take a big inhale. Breathe. Get oxygen. Breathe and really stretch yourself out to get moving. Those are great simple tips. Please try one or all of them to see which one works best for you. I just got a viewer question. Thank you so much for this. Perfect timing. How often should sedentary workers stand up and take walk breaks? There's a lot of different information about that, but it tends to be about every 30 minutes. And if you forget for an hour, don't worry about it. Just get up. But I find nowadays with smart watches and phones and programs that are on computers, if you're at home, you can just use your little timer. Like it could be a kitchen timer. Set it for 20 or 30 minutes, whatever you're appropriate. If you're on a conference call for 45 minutes, you're not going to be able to get up and down, especially if it's a Zoom meeting, but set the timer to go off as soon as the Zoom meeting is done so you can get up, march in place, stretch on the wall, do this. Take some deep breaths. If you can't move, just inhale and exhale. No one needs to know you're doing it. You can move your feet up and down just to get some circulation. I'm doing it right now. You're not even really aware of it. But I would say every 20, 30 minutes is the most recommended for getting up and down. But don't get mad at yourself if you forget for an hour. Just get up at that point. The key is don't be sitting for two to three hours every day without getting up. If you're in a restaurant and you're enjoying a meal, that's okay because that's a meal. You don't want to upset your system. You want to get a proper digestion while you eat. But if you're sitting at your desk immobile, tasking, it's really important for you to get up and get some movement in your body. I also have a second question. What's the most effective way to lose weight? That's a loaded question and it's a great question. I find with myself and my patients that there's such a huge variety of the most effective way to lose weight, but it definitely involves an improved diet. If I was going to note to the American Cancer Society who says you should maintain as lean of a weight as you can while being healthy, eating fruits and vegetables has been the number one thing that has been shown to link up with a decreased cancer risk. And also eating fruits and vegetables also is highly effective at helping people to lose weight. So everybody's body is different. Everybody's metabolism is different, but you need to put in some form of exercise and also improve your diet. What I've also found is that muscle, when you have more muscle on your body, it actually burns more calories while you sit here doing nothing to have more muscle on your body. And I've done this for myself and my patients by lifting weights. It doesn't have to be 25 pound dumbbells. You can do three to five pound dumbbells and put some muscle on your body. And then pretty soon while you're sitting at your desk for your 30 minutes before you get up, you're actually burning more calories which Obaltime will help you to lose weight. So thank you for that question. Okay, so let's go to video number seven to look a little bit more at how you can modify your workstation at home. A common problem with homework stations is that you don't have the proper desk setup because you're either working on your sofa, you're working at the kitchen table, you're standing working at the counter, you could be sitting in a futon like I was doing my editing. And you want to make sure you set your body up for success so you don't get an injury. So this is not an optimal setup. But let's say this is my laptop. How it would be bad is if you would be sitting in your chair like this. So you feel like your back's supported but it's completely rounding your spine. So number one thing you do is get a pillow to support your back, switch your rear end all the way back. And now you have a good back and neck setup. But the problem here is that if my arms are not supported on a surface, my neck and my shoulder muscles have to work really hard to type like this. So if you're in a scenario like this, it's important to put part of your hand on the surface that you're typing on. So I'm not pushing down, I'm just resting it there. It's ideal if you have an arm rest to rest your elbow on it so it takes the tension off of your shoulder. A lot of people will get pain in their neck over here, pain in their shoulder. So that's another thing that you can do to set your station. And it's also important not to look down this way but to rather tilt your chin so my neck is still straight and then gaze your eyes down or you can put your laptop up onto a surface. One more common thing that I see a lot of people working from home is they tend to sit like this with their arms in this position. And where that's a problem is because it creates an impingement position in your shoulders. So it's also important keep your elbows touching your sides. If you're typing here, don't be typing like this or leaning on a surface like that because you can injure the bicep tendon or the rotator cuff. Keep your elbows in and do this. It's better for your posture and so enjoy. Those are great ways to improve your posture while you're working at your desk at home. Many people were making masks early on the pandemic. If you like to sew, if you like to do needle point, it's important to support yourself so you don't get injured. And like I showed in the first video, support the first image, support your back with a pillow while you're on a sofa, while you're in your chair. It will do wonders for the comfort of your body to have that pastoral support. It just helps you to maintain your spinal curves. It also helps to maintain the shoulder where it attaches to your skeleton so you don't get impingement. I've got another question. I get lost in work. How can I remind myself to get up more frequently? It's a great question. Set a stove timer, set a little handy battery operated timer. I used to use that when I was living in Connecticut when I had projects. I would just set the timer for 20 or 30 minutes and when it went off, I had to get up and go turn it off so that I could move around. You can also drink water or have some sort of liquid that is making you get up from your chair to use the restroom. All of those things will be helpful. There's many ideas I'd actually love for people to come in and share with me some of their best ideas. So I also got a quote from an attorney. I was asking Catherine Noor, the host of the Wide World of Esports and the Honolulu Insurance Defense Attorney, to share some of her insights and how she was able to keep mobile or how sitting has impacted her by being at home in the office during the pandemic. Catherine's quote was, my job as an attorney requires a lot of sitting. My way of constantly combating the consequences of a sedentary occupation is to work out almost every day. I usually take Zoom classes in person or on Zoom and take body combat classes. I also use the stairs rather than elevator and walk when possible. That is key. If you have stairs in your office, if it's one flight, take one flight. It's so important to get your body moving and I know that I was talking about this yesterday. I was living in New York City and I was taking the stairs. I think there was 101 or 121 stairs. It's an odd number. I was counting when I had to get off the subway and walk all the way up to get to work and I didn't have much time to go to the gym or exercise when I was living in New York City but I got very lean. I often wondered when I would visit New York City why everybody is so lean because it's such a pastime of New Yorkers to go out to eat and enjoy yourselves for lavish meals. I didn't understand why people weren't gaining weight until I actually lived there and was walking everywhere and taking the stairs up and down whenever I could. Oftentimes the stairs were faster than taking an elevator and in the subway systems it's more convenient to take the stairs. Any opportunity that you can to take the stairs, take them. That's another way to also lose weight as well as combat some of the effects that sitting or being more sedentary over the past 18 months has done to our bodies. So let's go to video eight where we can learn some quick posture fixes that you can do at home. So you've caught yourselves slouching or you were really involved in your project or you were wrapping Christmas presents or holiday gifts and you're hunching forward. What do you do now your shoulder hurts your neck hurts? A simple way is to stand against a wall. You put your foot on the wall. You walk your feet forward like you're holding up the wall and you just press your shoulders into the wall. So you're trying to move this closer to the wall. It's not the same as putting your elbows back because when you put your elbows back the shoulder doesn't move and you want to get the shoulder back. So you press back into the wall. I like to put my hands on my thighs so that I don't push them back and leave my shoulder forward. I put my hands on my thighs squeeze and try to touch your shoulder back to the wall. You can hold it there for five seconds. You can challenge yourself and see if you can hold it for 30 seconds. Suck your stomach in to stabilize your spine. Don't urge your back like this. Keep this here and squeeze back. That's an excellent one. You can also pretend like you're making a W and try to suck your stomach in and touch your arms or your hands if you can to the wall. That's an excellent way just to activate those posture muscles or if you can and there's no pain hold it. Press press press see how long you can hold it hold it hold it. And there's two more ways to open your chest. You can use a towel at home roll it and put it in your thoracic spine the part that has been rounded. Use that here and then open up yourself over that. Do the W position right by your side. Take big inhales and open up your chest or if you have a doorway you can do the doorway stretch and roll up. You put your hands straight out like you're the letter T put one foot in front of the other and then you lean forward lift your chest breathe in and really open up that chest lean forward breathe in you'll do three inhale and then you switch legs do the same thing lean forward lift your chest inhale so you can enjoy feeling better. Watch these videos over and over and over again. They're so excellent. You can also refer back to my previous shows called movement matters where I depict each body part and I spend more time going through each of those stretches but those are savers for neck pain savers for shoulder pain savers for back pain headaches all of those things. Many of my patients are doing that vertical fold roll foam roll I learned that in Mary Massery's class just sitting in their chair putting it right at the base of their neck their upper back and scooting back and just putting that there it just kind of pops your chest up and when you do that I don't know if you could see it like nods my head down so you don't have to be actively tilting your chin down to look at your laptops so that you're in good posture as soon as you put that vertical foam roll it just puts your body in alignment with gravity so that your muscles just don't have to work that hard and that's what we want if we have to sit or stand in a prolonged posture for a prolonged period of time as we just don't want our muscles to work that hard because we don't want them to be under strain which can then lead to pain and injury. I want to get you out of pain I want to keep you out of pain so you can do everything you love and be safe while many of us are enjoying the benefit of working more from the comfort of our home. I've got one more question how can I work in bed in better posture this is uh I didn't get an image of this although I have one somewhere I um I used to ask some of my patients when they complained of neck and upper back pain or they had that that hump right at the base of their neck I don't happen to have one but I asked you're not watching tv in bed or reading in bed like this and basically the posture that I showed was leaning back with their head kind of pushed up against the pillows like that so you feel supported because you're leaning against the headboard but the problem with that is gravity never takes a day off and as you are sitting there leaned back with your head crunched up against those pillows you're forcing your neck into that forward posture now over the time like say you do it for an hour every night for five to ten it's a habit that you developed many years collagen is constantly forming in our bodies and you become how you hold yourself so if you're sitting there cranked against your headboard you're creating strain on the ligaments that connect one vertebrae to the other and that's where some people will get that bump at the base of their neck from looking down for a long period of time sitting against your headboard so if you want to do that in bed with your feet stretched out long it's a lot of modifications you can get one of those triangle shaped pillows it's a wedge wedge yourself there and then put a pillow in your back so that you can lean your head against the headboard and you'll be straight like this while you look instead of like bent forward that way I hope that helps let's go to image number nine I wanted to add a little inspiration as well to your home so this quote I was talking about I can't actually read it that nothing happens fast and it's important to be persistent and be consistent with what you're doing so that you can enjoy the reward at the end and this is why I'm bringing this to you is if you just be consistent and persistent with one small change every day you can enjoy the reward of a great feeling body and being in less pain feeling better about yourself at the beginning and at the end of your day so I'm going to wrap up physical therapy for a better life right now and I want to wish you all a great week a great holiday and please tune in in the new year to physical therapy for a better life life is better when you listen to your physical therapist aloha everyone