Welcome back to the healthy workstation. This lesson is entitled sitting and our focus is on the seated workstation. Sitting in a desk and on a chair has historically been the workstation of choice in most of the world. The seated workstation continues to be popular today. Many people prefer sitting when they need to perform tasks that require high levels of concentration or when they need to manipulate documents or devices. And for some folks, alternatives to sitting are not always orthopedically appropriate, or they're just not desirable secondary to other concerns.

In this lesson, we're going to explore some techniques and suggestions that can help you to make your seated workstation an incredibly healthy one. As we begin We should ask an answer a couple of questions about sitting to set the stage. First, as we often hear these days is sitting the new smoking. In other words, is sitting as potentially damaging to our health, as smoking has proven to be. The answer is, it depends. It depends on how we are sitting, and actually for how long.

Prolonged sitting in awkward unnatural positions can certainly increase loads on our tissues and impair our circulation. Studies have shown that excessive sitting can slow down our metabolisms cause inflammation, and even reduce our ability to concentrate and solve problems. But their strategic use of ergonomics can address most of these issues and potentially eliminate them. The next question is can we make the work fit the worker? Or can we make the seated workstation more ergonomically correct and comfortable for our unique bodies? And the answer to that question question is yes, to some extent, we can improve our workstations fit and combine this with some key behaviors to make our sitting more productive and have less potential negative impacts on our health.

In the most general terms, the human body is well designed for a variety of movements such as walking, bending, twisting, crawling, running, jumping, throwing, lifting, carrying, squatting and lying down to name a few. But we really are only made to sit for brief periods of time. The use of chairs, desks and offices is a relatively modern invention from an evolutionary perspective. But this is the world in which we live in work and we can make our sitting safer and less harmful. If you sit for many hours per day at work. The tips and recommendations we go over will be very helpful, but in reality, a reduction in your overall daily sitting time will most likely be beneficial.

I personally use a seated workstation for about 25% of my work day, with the rest of my time being spent at several variations of standup desks. This ratio works great for me, and I don't have any problems with this mixture. But if I sit more, I will tend to develop stiffness and soreness in my back. Your mileage may vary but I encourage you to experiment not only with the ergonomics tools we are about to discuss, but with the total amount of sitting that works best for your body. We are going to discuss four key areas for the seated workstation. They are chair setup, desk arrangement, monitor and keyboard considerations, and workstation habits.

With chair setup, the first thing we want to recognize is that we need to minimize poor positioning. That includes things like excessive slumping or slouching. This creates mechanical overload on our tissues, that stress we've talked About earlier and we know that accelerates the likelihood of inflammation, injury and pain. Ideal sitting posture takes the well stacked alignment of the upper body on the pelvis, which is much like a vertical plumb line going through the ear, shoulder, elbow and hip when viewed from the side, and this represents the normal curvature of the spine. It encourages approximately 90 degree angles at the ankles, knees, hips and elbows and this creates a feet flat on the floor, mid range position of the body, which allows us to better tolerate sitting forces. A somewhat level pelvis with some degree of variance for each individual is also supported.

Proper sitting also exhibits good symmetry with respect to side to side relationships in the body, as well as the avoidance of rotation or twisting. That's the position that a good chair set up will allow and it makes us more durable as we go through our workday when setting The basic office chair, start with the seat height and adjust it so that allows for those 90 degree bends at the ankles, knees and hips. then tweak this slightly up or down until it feels most comfortable for you. Next, adjust the forward rearward tilt of the seat pan. If this feature is available on your chair until it allows you to have an approximately level pelvis and what feels like a normal, comfortable spinal curvature. At this point we should appreciate some folks will prefer a bit more back arch and others a bit less.

This posture is achieved by manipulating the height and tilt of the seat. A higher and more forward tilted as if water was pouring off the front seat encourages more back arching also known as extension or lordosis. While a lower or rearward tilting seat can contribute to back rounding, also called flexion or kyphosis. We're really only talking about subtle adjustments here. You can also address this condition by sliding forward or backward on your seat sitting at the front edge one will encourage back arching and sitting all the way back will foster a more rounded position. In reality, we basically want to be very close to that neutral zone and not excessive in either extreme.

Now to the chair backrest. First of all, you may prefer not to use this at all like me, and such a practice usually supports a more upright posture. If you do use the chair back, adjust its its height and its forward backward inclination so that you feel gentle support in your ideal posture. Avoid working in a very reclined position for any length of time as well. Some folks like a bit more support in their lower back and for that I recommend a lumbar roll. This can be a special cylindrical pillow, or a rolled towel or fleece blanket like I use in my example.

The goal here is to comfortably fill In any airspace between the chair and the lower back, and to provide general support, or really just a reminder to actively hold good posture. making all of these adjustments in chair setup doesn't necessarily make you impervious to sitting all day. But it certainly optimizes gravitational loads and significantly increases your comfort and tolerance of sitting overall. Sometimes, we used to