COVID-19 Prompts People To Stay Indoors: Causing Back Pain Due To Bad Posture.
As our government leaders and health officials urge social distancing in order to avoid the spread of coronavirus, many Americans have begun to work from home.
While working from home in your pajamas seems like a small perk, most people don’t have a designated workspace. Some of us have had to improvise doing our jobs from the couch, bed or kitchen table.
According to Dr. Rahul Shah, a board-certified orthopedic spine and neck surgeon, “when working from home, the issue that most people face is that they don’t have a predefined workspace like they might in their office. Because of this, their body is accommodating differently than it does in a traditional work setting. You may be working off your couch or on your bed and so you tend to have a more rounded posture. Just as you adjust your space to be comfortable at work, it is important to adjust your space at home.”
Poor posture can lead to more than just back pain. According to both the Mayo Clinic and Harvard University, some surprising consequences of bad posture include headaches, incontinence, constipation, heartburn, slow digestion as well as pain in the neck, shoulders, hips, knees or feet. “Having poor posture may lead to aches and pains, but having it over the long term is when you get real damage,” says chiropractor Andrew Bang, DC.
Poor posture forces you to overwork the muscles in your neck and back. Your immune system’s efforts to heal those muscles spur inflammation that — over time — can lead to arthritis in nearby joints.
As of now, we don’t know when our lives might return to normal, so with our homes likely doubling as our workspaces for the foreseeable future, we must pay attention to where and how we sit.
If you are having aches and pains from the long hours in front of the computer, try taking a short break every 20-30 minutes if you can. You can simply get up and move around for a few minutes before resuming work. This may help alleviate some of those aches. For a more permanent solution, you can try the Body-Aline, a machine that not only relieves back and neck pain, but also realigns your posture in only 2 minutes a day.
The Body-Aline corrects the muscular imbalance between opposing muscle groups that causes poor posture by training your body in the exact opposite direction of a slump. It stretches tight muscles in the front and strengthens the weak muscles the in back, while providing a soothing massage to the muscles along the spine. It is based on the principles of Mirror Image Muscle Rehabilitation which states that if poor posture is caused by habitual forward movement, resulting in a slumped outward appearance, then the condition can be reversed with a guided exercise movement in the exact opposite direction.
If you are one of the thousands of Americans working remote from a makeshift space inside your home, I urge you to consider your overall health during this time. Staying home is extremely important. It is what we must do in order to beat this coronavirus pandemic. But remember, someday this too shall pass. One day, hopefully in the near future, our normal lives will continue, and the decisions we make today will continue to affect our future outcomes. Our bad posture may register as back pain or headaches today, but it can become something more serious, like arthritis tomorrow. Moving around, stretching and strengthening your back can help you avoid a future of chronic pain. There’s one product in the market that is proven to relieve the pain and realign your spine, the Body-Aline.
