 Welcome to another session of Nikki Bath. Today our country is again in a grip of this menace which has been troubling us for the last one year and I appreciate a lot of people are working from home. We thought it is the right time to talk to you about how your posture and position sitting long hours at work on a workstation can affect you. There's no doubt we get patients with a lot of work related problems and increasing so in the recent past. Now as a specialist hip and knee unit, I'd like to introduce our members here and we will be talking about work ergonomics and healthy joints today. So essentially myself Dr. Yogi are we talking to you about how work postures affect your knees and calves and ankles. My colleague Dr. Nabil an orthopedic surgeon will talk to you about how work affects the upper extremities your neck and back and our colleague and rehab specialist Dr. Vishwa is going to show you the basics of healthy posture and show you some basic stretches which you should be carrying out on a day-to-day basis. So when a lot of us work from home either for study or for you know online meetings which we are increasingly doing these days we usually have a laptop working at home. A home environment may not have a workstation like I have here in the sticks. I'd just like to start by showing you this photograph where somebody's sitting at a workstation. Now this is a very very common posture which many people adopt especially when they are more engrossed in their study. This increasingly happens so when one is using a laptop. You can see this person's neck how it is in relation with his back and this is typically what we call an S-shaped posture if you see when the knees are bent a lot more than a right angle and the feet are excessively bent backwards as well. Now this posture is very likely to give you calf likeness. We get a lot of people who have knee related problems which very well relate to posture. Sitting for long hours not having good exercise can in addition give you an increase in weight and give you a further weakness of muscles which then further aggravates knee pain. There is no doubt that knee arthritis in early years is on the rise as we've talked before and these postures will definitely aggravate that. Apart from arthritis that is cartilage affection in the knee per se. This is aggravated to by muscle weakness and it is muscles which are arranged in groups on either side. When we have the knee in bent postures the back muscles get tight whereas the muscles on the front of the knee that is the quadriceps get weak. So it is not only about keeping strength of your muscles but stretching ones which get tight from longer to accustomed long and unaccustomed not very physiological or healthy positions. Now a lot of people can have innate problems because of a slight malalignment in their bones and these are the ones who are going to get further aggravated with affections like this. Now that is in short about your legs. My colleague Dr Nabil will explain to you how it affects your hands and your neck particularly. So when you start working in such a position for long hours you tend to have neck pains, you tend to have lower back, make back aches, you tend to have wrist elbow pains. These are the most common problems that you tend to face with. Now what are the reasons for these pains that you are having? One reason is you are pressing against your wrist as you are working which is not in a good position. You tend to develop what is known as carpal tunnel syndrome. So which is reason for your wrist pains that is due to the blockage of the media nerve that passes through your wrist. This can be avoided by proper resting position of your wrist, some pads below your wrist. Another issue that you could be facing is elbow pains where you might be in an abnormal position for a long time. You might end up developing something called tendonitis where the tendons which are inserted onto your elbows have been strained for a long period of time which results in swelling pains. You may not be able to do some specific movements. You may also end up having neck pains because of your sitting position, your stooping forwards. This may result in your chronic pains at the side of the neck one side or the other side may pain. This may be most prominent by the end of the day. You may also have lower back or mid-back pains because your body is not designed to be in such a position for a long time. You should be sitting on a 90 degree with your back supported on your back wrist. All this can lead to chronic pains within your body. Now these are more prominent in such times because you are forced to sit in a different workspace environment and you should make sure that you do your necessary stretches and your exercises which we will follow with Dr. Vishwaranjan Das. So posture is the most important aspect of ergonomics. When this pandemic situation is going on and you want to sit for long hours with work, try and avoid sitting with the laptops and curling up in the bed. If not a chair, try and sit with a table or in a dining table where you can have a proper posture. In posture, make sure your chair is always supported, your back is always supported by the chair. Make sure your hip, knee and ankle angle has to be 90 or more than that. When it comes to upper limb, try and make sure your elbows are supported. It has to be 60 to 90 degree flex or bend and when you are holding the mouse or the keypad, try to get supported with a pad. So this is about posture. When it comes about the screen or walking with the desktop, make sure your level of eyes has to be at the top of the screen and your back has to be straight. To avoid having chronic pains or aches around the body, I will take you few stretches which can be done at any place irrespective of your at the working place or at home. To start with the stretches, I can take you few stretches like neck stretches. Whenever you are walking for long hours, you can just get up and can do neck moments up and down side to side and at the same time to release the pressure over the shoulder, you can do just shoulder shrugs to release this part and make it feel lighter. When it comes to the elbow and wrist, simple stretches at home keeping the elbow and wrist straight and stretching it this way. You can hold for 5 to 10 seconds to release the tension over the muscles. When it comes to back and hip, simple back stretches like keeping your wrist around your waist and stretching it up can itself will help and to reduce the tension around your hamstring and calf, simple stretches like touching your toes or maybe keeping your foot up and touching it. That itself will definitely take around your posture. So keep doing stretches and keep your body fit. Well I hope our team has been able to tell you the importance of certain things to be done at home and avoiding problems in future. We will meet again on Friday the 28th of May for our next session of Niki Baat where we will be talking to you about certain myths related to knee pain, problems with alignment and the necessities of operations rather for young people how to avoid avoid the operations. Thank you and all the best stay home, stay safe.