I started stretching and walking around once an hour or so few years ago, and it is the simplest most efficient prevention to various pains.
Even in harsh deadlines, when I feel the slightest pain, I stop everything, and get-up/stretch/walk around for 5 minutes. Health is above everything else.
Dude, I'm trying to do this right now because of back pain and stuff.
It looks nice on paper but I have trouble focusing so when I actually get in the zone I tend to forget and hours go by, I only stop when I'm actually experiencing pain (an stimulus which reminds me to get back to reality).
I had the same problem. Tried the standing desk, no go. Couldn't get in the zone ever (and I tried it for 2 full weeks).
My tip: drink a LOT of fluids. You will have to keep going to the bathroom which is a natural break point, and not something as abrupt as an alarm; the urge to pee sort of creeps on you, so you can stay in the zone until you really gotta go. The hydration is good for your brain/body anyway, so win-win.
Found that lack of fluids (water!!!) was the source of many of my headaches, so I came at this solution from that angle.
As an aside, this does require you to chunk your work differently. I've found it's a great practice to use such opportunities to keep up with the communication part of your work, so that when you hit the desk again, your mind & messaging apps are clear of those social notifications
You need to work on focusing so that you can take breaks and go right back to work. There are many ways to improve that from simply 'do it' to using a certain playlist. I started with the playlist and have now use a combination of that with 'do it' discipline.
I can't find the quote (Shakespeare maybe?), but paraphrasing it says the worst time in ones life is the moment between deciding to do something and doing something. The goal is to get rid of that moment in between.
Hemingway, on the subject of staying motivated, offered that you should quit writing when you know what happens next.
Work on decomposing work into a bunch of independent steps, and stop when you finish a step. For me it seems to work best when there is one clear course to work on next (easier to retain it when I interrupt myself).
Another trick is drink more fluids. Your bladder will tell you when it’s time to take a break.
I've been using a standing desk for about 2.5 years. I stand almost all the time but I tend to take few mile walks every few hours to break up coding / thinking, etc..
I no longer do it by a schedule because my mind will tell me when I should go, but to begin with I would just set an alarm and go get up every 2 or 3 hours, and if you're close to finishing something important (say 10 minutes), finish it first and then go.
In addition to the other comment suggesting yoga for back pain, I might recommend you see a physiotherapist. You want not only stretching but also strengthening and it's difficult to figure this stuff out yourself. In my case, I found out I had no idea how to correctly activate my transversus abdominis, which is a muscle that should be active during all waking hours to support the spine.
Go to a bathroom on the opposite side of the building. Bonus points if it's not on the same floor. It's the best way to get a forced walk. Hey, and you even get to chat with the other departments!
I wonder how this affects people who meditate regularly for few hours every day. They mostly sit cross legged or in lotus pose, but they do sit for a significant amount of time.
I recently introduced a glassboard to my (home) office, and it makes me stand up regularly, so that's a possible alternative to a standing desk (which I don't like).
If you have the luxury of home office, get a fitness bank next to your computer and once an hour do some weight exercises, or once 4 hours do some 10-minute HIIT. It'd do wonders to you. Earning $ and getting ripped at the same time ;-)
There is a Cochrane review [1] on the health effects of reducing time spent sitting at work that came out two years ago, which laid out the truth in no uncertain terms:
"The quality of evidence is low to very low for most interventions, mainly because of limitations in study protocols and small sample sizes."
And still people keep doing shit like this, performing studies with fifteen people??
Idk the exact answer, but I doubt the reason is "researchers don't understand the statistics." It is some "how the sausage is made" reason, most likely.
For example: researchers have the budget/resources to to a preliminary study. They use the interesting results of this study to secure funding for a larger sample size study.
Btw, a small sample size study isn't useless necessarily. You can refine methodology, with less on the line. You can also (more or less) validly exclude certain conclusions, to avoid wasting resources on a wider study.
The problem is with pop science headlines, like it is in any other journalistic field. I think it's less of a problem though, than many think. Publishing in the popular press needs to be understood as "academics working on X" not "X has been proven."
>The problem is with pop science headlines, like it is in any other journalistic field. I think it's less of a problem though, than many think. Publishing in the popular press needs to be understood as "academics working on X" not "X has been proven."
Writing a headline that misrepresents a single study's conclusion as "proven" or what "scientists say" -- especially when the conclusion is contradicted by most others on the subject -- should be considered by journalistic ethics watchdogs as an extreme violation bordering on an outright lie.
The media seems simultaneously bewildered as to why the public no longer trusts it, while incapable of recognizing and responding properly to obvious breaches of the public trust like inflated science headlines.
Its not just science, it's anything. Also, it's not just media, it's everything.
The only thing to do is individual. Take "facts" with a grain of salt, at the very least until you have read the article. Do not take headlines as facts.
You can just read academic journal abstracts, if you want a more academic and precise reading materials.
There are trade offs between rigour and the digestible content intended to be browsed over coffee.
>Take "facts" with a grain of salt, at the very least until you have read the article. Do not take headlines as facts.
One consequence of social media is that headlines now have outsized importance in relation to the substance of actual articles.
Headlines, thanks to links and embedded snippets, get dispersed to 1000x more eyeballs than the articles themselves. So when they contradict or misleadingly oversimplify (which is often, especially since they are often written to draw clicks) it's the headline version of the truth that wins out, while the actual readers are left to chime in with "Hey, that's not what the article actually said..." in the comments below, swept away in a sea of respondents who commented only after reading the headline.
Journalistic ethics haven't caught up to this. They're still playing by the rules of legacy media, where you can bend the truth a little to make a joke or to draw people in. The problem is that in the digital age, that unfortunately amounts to spreading a falsehood that usually overshadows the facts of the piece.
Let’s go one step further - unless you have some experience understanding academic journals (many here do), even the journals may suggest something that isn’t true by way of you reading into it.
Some things everyone here should know (like correlations and what they mean). Other things many won’t know, like certain statistics methods, base rates for a given thing, etc.
It’s easy for two people to read the same study and come out with totally different conclusions based on their individual context.
The study only shows that blood flow to your brain drops when you are sitting for a long period of time. So I think 15 people is a huge sample in this case.
The study doesn't even has any conclusions. So I think 15 people is fine.
The next step could be gathering data from thousands of people to check weather this causes brain damage in any form. But that's not what the study was about. Only the title of the article suggests this.
for something along the lines of basic organ system operation like blood flow, you need only a small sample to show that there is an effect.
example: a sample of 12 people would be more than enough to prove that people bleed if they are cut. you could look at a sample of 10k people just to be sure -- but you're not going to learn anything new. the experimental measurement of the variable is too high level.
the point of this study is to corroborate past research and provide another avenue of future investigation. if a future study finds that the inverse is true, we now have reason to be suspicious of that study's conclusions.
I concur the review linked is more about effectiveness of intervention methods. My point was that it's been so thoroughly highlighted that we need bigger sample sizes, and yet here we are with N=15.
As for "invalidating the health benefits of standing vs sitting", here is a well-designed study [1] (N=7300 and 12-year span) that found
"""
Occupations involving predominantly standing were associated with an approximately 2-fold risk of heart disease compared with occupations involving predominantly sitting. This association was robust to adjustment for other health, sociodemographic, and work variables.
"""
I.e. I think we can reasonably claim that the jury is still out on the health benefits of standing desks etc.
OTOH, that increased exercise is a good thing is undisputed.
Thanks, that's a really interesting result - especially in the face of countless headlines (with weak supporting data) about the dangers of sitting. I'm curious to see what "adjustment for work variables" means, since that's such an open-ended task.
I'm also fascinated to see: "Cardiovascular risk associated with occupations that involve combinations of sitting, standing, and walking differed for men and women, with these occupations associated with lower cardiovascular risk estimates among men but elevated risk estimates among women."
I would have guessed that mixed position, moderately-active work was drastically better than anything else across all groups. I'd be surprised if the paradoxical gender result holds, normally those imply a weak or confounded effect, but even if it's simply neutral that means my expectations were massively wrong.
The last company I worked for had a "market research" report about mobile data users that claimed 75% of people do X, the rest do Y. The sample size was 4. What's worse is that the report was beautifully styled. It's amazing how much money can be wasted on moot work when you have funding.
It's actually terrible for your butt (or at least your gluteus muscles, especially the gluteus medius).
When you sit all day these muscles get inhibited/weak. When they're weak, you're more likely to have lower back pain. I sit a lot so I try to counteract that (as best as can be done) with some targeted glute med stuff after work.
At age 28, after 14 years of pretty intense computer usage... my body is an absolute mess. I work out, do yoga, run. Nothing completely frees me from the pain I have mostly from sitting all day, every day for my work.
As a teacher I used to spend about 6 hours a day sitting at a desk, and was having progressively worse lower back issues. 6 years ago I got a standing desk, which improved things quite a lot but only to a point.
3 months ago I started a body weight program, and this has done wonders for my lower back. There is still work to do, but the improvement has been consistent. I’m looking forward to how it (and me generally) will feel in a year!
Exercising can help fix some postural issues but depending on where you start from( i.e. how bad your posture actually is) you probably need to do a lot more targeted stuff than just exercising. You can visit a pt to help you but if you aren't convinced you should check this video
I had rounded shoulders and anterior pelvic tilt myself due to lack of exercising and too much desk work but not as much as the guy on the thumbnail. I just exercised for about a year and my posture fixed itself but I started from a better starting point with no actual pain.
Btw if you decide to do some research yourself about the issues you have, don't just follow the first video you watch but instead spend some time learning the subject. There are plenty of different issues people have that require different treatments( hence an entire profession being based around fixing them).
You need to do compound exercises with a barbell, namely low back squat and deadlift. These target the so called posterior chain, which is all those crucial muscles you don’t see in the mirror. Mindlessly “working out” is not going to target all that to a sufficient extent.
I was where you are now, started lifting and my back pain was completely gone within 2 months. I have been totally free of back pain for over 5 years now, going from not being able to lift a 60lbs barbell without pain to deadlifting 500lbs.
So the full backstory is that I injured my back when I was 20, playing tennis barefoot of all things. My doctor just gave me muscle relaxers and told me to stretch more, which I of course did not do. Since then, I have re-injured my lower back three or four times, doing deadlifts and squats (incorrectly, I guess, not through lack of trying though.) Since my last injury, I have lowered weight, focused on form even more, and started doing Yoga for better core strength and flexibility. It is slowly helping and I haven't re-injured myself for over a year. I think I have just severely damaged my spine and I should probably go see a good doctor, chiropractor, or licensed massage therapist like some other comments have suggested. To quote episode 7 of HBO's hit limited series, "Sharp Objects", "Your health is not a debt you just cancel. The body collects."
This! I didn’t lift for a while thinking it was just for meatheads etc. did lots of hiking / yoga but that stuff just doesn’t add the right muscles to your arms / hands . ESP grip strength to prevent rsi
Can confirm, suffered from RSI as well. I think most doctors are unaware of the benefits. If they were, they wouldn’t prescribe the bullshit they’re currently prescribing. I’m not saying this will help everybody, but it’s 100% worth a try before trying anything more “medical”.
Go to an actual honest licensed massagist first. And GP, since this is not right at all and sitting with breaks shouldn't do this. (not a doctor, but this might be how early lumbar disk problem manifests)
Copied from another sub-thread. So the full backstory is that I injured my back when I was 20, playing tennis barefoot of all things. My doctor just gave me muscle relaxers and told me to stretch more, which I of course did not do. Since then, I have re-injured my lower back three or four times, doing deadlifts and squats (incorrectly, I guess, not through lack of trying though.) Since my last injury, I have lowered weight, focused on form even more, and started doing Yoga for better core strength and flexibility. It is slowly helping and I haven't re-injured myself for over a year. I think I have just severely damaged my spine and I should probably go see a good doctor, chiropractor, or licensed massage therapist like some other comments have suggested. To quote episode 7 of HBO's hit limited series, "Sharp Objects", "Your health is not a debt you just cancel. The body collects."
I’d second this. I’m 25, have a broken back and still don’t have much pain in my lower back vs. what GP described. I’ve been doing the computer all day thing for about the same amount of time. If it’s a quality of life thing, get it checked out!
Can't speak for everyone else downvoting the above, but after seeing a chiropractor for an hour a week for 12 weeks, getting poked, prodded, pressed and acupunctured each session for up to an hour, I felt significantly better.
A couple of years later, I saw a licensed massage therapist who after looking at my back for a minute, diagnosed exactly what had been wrong with me previously (my spine had become somewhat crooked, almost S shaped) and that it was visible that I'd had successful treatment to correct it.
I probably understand both sides of the debate over chiropractic better than most, so I'll try to answer.
Chiropractic has become highly controversial for two main reasons.
The first is that it claims its treatments (muscular-skeletal adjustments) can bring about healing of a wide array of illnesses in the body beyond just back pain. The basis of the claim is that by straightening the muscular-skeletal structure, they remove blockages in blood vessels and nerves, and the resulting improvement in blood flow and nerve signalling leads to improvements in organ function, immunity, tissue healing/growth, cognition, etc.
The second is that one of its major treatments, the vigorous "neck-cracking" adjustment of the cervical spine, can occasionally cause a rupture to the main artery to the brain, leading to haemorrhage that can result in severe disability or mortality.
Skeptics will argue that it's impossible that muscular-skeletal adjustments can heal other illnesses in the body. I gather some of them will dispute that muscular-skeletal misalignments can cause significant blockages in nerves and blood vessels, whereas others will deny that removing said blockages can lead to other health improvements. For what its worth, it seems the linked article lends some credence to the notion that muscular-skeletal alignment can influence other aspects of a person's health.
Regarding the neck adjustment risk issue: opponents of chiro will concede that ruptures are very infrequent (estimates vary from once per several hundred thousand adjustments, to once per a few millon), but conclude that given the absence of benefits, it's not a risk worth taking.
My own experience with chiro is mixed. I have used it a lot in the past, and I no longer do. I do believe that in some cases, serious misalignments in the muscular-skeletal system can cause nerve and blood-vessel blockages and lead to other impairments in the body. However I haven't found chiro to be the best way to relieve the pain or misalignments I'd been carrying; I've recently had better success with osteopathy and myotherapy (a form of massage focusing on the myofascial system).
I have found some chiropractors (more than half those I've seen) to be over-confident about the benefits of their treatments. But then a handful of chiropractors (practitioners of a particular mind+body healing technique) have been the most valuable practitioners I've seen, of any kind.
I have had neck adjustments and never had a problem, but I wouldn't encourage others to do it or allow it do be done to my children, and these days I avoid having it done, preferring to focus on relieving muscle tension through myotherapy.
