How Sitting Is KILLING Your Back & Body

TRANSCRIPTIONSo I have a question, how many actual hours do you sit in a given day? And before you answer that, I’m not just talking about behind the computer, but what about like watching TV at night? What about when you eat at your table or a restaurant? What about when you’re driving? What about when you’re shopping online? I mean, we spend a tremendous amount of time sitting. And today we want to talk about sitting in relationship to what it’s actually doing to your fitness level. See, fitness is not necessarily equated to health.
It’s a different thing. It’s like a subcategory. It makes up one part of health.
You have what you eat, you have supplements, you have sleep, but you also have exercise, motion, movement, right? You can’t get fit without motion. And fitness actually, if you really look at it, it’s an enhanced or increased capacity to survive with your environment. In other words, it’s this extra thing that allows you to get through life and buffer stress more easily, be more flexible, stronger, look better, feel better. My purpose for exercising is mainly, primarily how I feel. I just like how I feel and what it can do for stress. And also it has to do with how well you’re going to perform in sports or even just getting off of a chair or just sitting on the floor and getting up.
Some people have a difficult time getting up from sitting on the ground. That would equate to a poor fitness. How much flexibility do you have? How much endurance do you have? Basically, when you look at it, your fitness level is your ability to adapt to your environment.
If you can’t adapt, you have problems. If you can adapt, you can prevent a lot of problems health-wise. So if we look at the flip side to that, which I did a video on this being sedentary, there’s a medical term for this called hypokinetic syndrome, which means hypo, low kinetic motion syndrome or diseases. And there’s a whole bunch of them having to do with your lymphatic system because the lymphatic system needs motion to push things through it. Having to do with your oxygen levels and your circulation, also the accumulation of stress, motion exercise helps flush out stress. And there’s a whole bunch of diseases connected to the stress accumulation as well.
So I want to give you some strategies to counter the amount of hours that you sit. I spent a lot of time sitting. Unfortunately, I’m behind a computer at least eight hours a day, and I’ve been doing that for a very long time.
So we have what sitting does to your physical body because you’re holding your body fixed for long periods of time, not very healthy for your lower back because just by sitting, you add another 30% to 40% of extra stress on your lumbar discs. You also, the way you sit, either in a car or on your couch or in your chair, you reverse the curve in your lower back. And you can start to affect your posture when you hunch over. And that can lead to sciatic pain and back pain. And I tell you, just one little alteration in your lower back can affect your shoulders, your neck, muscles, everything’s connected. And then you have what sitting does to your gluteus maximus, your butt, right? It creates atrophy.
And what it does to your hamstrings, it tightens your hamstrings. It tightens what’s called the psoas muscle, the muscle that connects the upper part of your body to your lower body. It’s part of your core.
So you have those stresses. And then you have the stress of the computer screen that’s right in front of you with the LED blue lights. See, blue light is very different. It’s a very high energy frequency that doesn’t get filtered from our eyes. And there’s a much greater increased risk of damage to the macula, the back part of your retina of the eye, accelerating age-related macular degeneration, increasing risk for cataracts, and also just poor vision. In fact, that probably was the reason why I need glasses for various things now because of the amount of hours I’ve spent in front of this computer screen, not to mention just fixating on a certain distance, which is not very good for your eyes. Plus this blue light fatigues your eye muscles, decreases melatonin, which affects your sleep. So we will talk about how to counter all this, but I just wanted to bring your awareness of that. Then you have something called EMF, electromagnetic fields.
What happens with EMF is you have this invisible thing. You can’t see it. And it’s a certain frequency of energy that comes out of things like this, comes from your computer, comes from the power cables underneath your computer that you plug things into. And it really comes from the battery backup to your computer, as well as in the screen. Anything electronics is going to put out these EMFs. It’s called a Trifield, which allows you to measure how much EMF that you’re being exposed to. And so I was basically bathing myself in front of this computer for just so many years.
And I found a really big source was the power cable and the battery backup. So what I do now is I take all that stuff and I push it as far away as I can away from me so I can limit the exposure. Because it can affect electromagnetic fields in your body, especially with your heart. I was even starting to get palpitations and arrhythmias from that. But mainly when the magnetic fields were very high, it just basically kind of wears out your heart. You just feel tired. So you have this sedentary situation, this fixed body position. You have what it does to your back, your shoulders, your neck. Working on the mouse on your right hand with the carpal tunnel syndrome.
So what can we do? Okay, number one, frequent breaks. Because it’s not necessarily how many hours you sit. It’s how frequently you can break that pattern up. So I highly recommend that you do that. It’s very, very important to take frequent breaks at least once an hour. There are certain apps.
One app is called a Stand Up. It’s a free app. That reminds you. But there’s a lot of other ones. But Stand Up do stretches, shoulders, back, neck. I have many different ways of stretching.
One recent thing is this mobility stick that I just got. And I have several of these different sizes. There’s these great stretching exercises that you can reverse this posture that you’re in all day long. Also, when I’m driving, I have a lumbar support. But I actually made my own out of just this from a dollar store. You have these foam things right here. And I just cut them. And I just put it right in my lower back. It saves my lower back.
Because think about it. If you’re driving and you’re reversing this curve because the seats in cars are the worst, right? And they just reverse this curve. You’re going to start having more pressure on the discs.
You’re going to start getting back pain. So you want to maintain that curve. And the problem is right now I have a Jeep. And I love the Jeep. But I’m a bit too tall. And you can’t lower the darn seat.

So I’m looking right at the top of the window. So I have to kind of slouch down a little bit to see that, which affects my neck. Because really, when you’re sitting, you want to be able to sit up nice and tall, right? You want to keep your posture, keep the curve in there. And there’s all sorts of philosophies on how you should sit. You know, don’t cross your legs, do this or that. I recommend that you get a very comfortable chair.
And I have a different type of chair that allow a lot more motion to my back. Because I don’t sit there fixed. I’m moving back and forth. This is the chair I have in this office right here. You can see that it moves. And I have different ones.
It’s important to keep moving as you’re sitting. So you can actually counter this fixated state. And of course, I do a lot of stretches with the acupressure device that I created too. So basically, you want to take breaks and you want to reverse the posture. Maybe do extension type exercises.
Maybe do weights with the arms. Be creative. Be strategic. Maybe you get your workout with all these breaks every hour. Let’s say you do squats, right? Or you do push-ups. Or you dance, right? You dance for five minutes. That throws off this fixed pattern that we lock ourselves into. I mean, that’s a great way to do interval training. You do maybe a minute workout, high intensity. And you rest for a period of time. And you do that a few times. And then you go back to work for another, you know, 55 minutes. And you do that several hours of the day. I mean, you just killed two birds with one stone. You got your workout. And you got your work done. I think yoga is a really key type of exercise that helps to reverse this posture. Pilates is another one that I like. And I also talked about having hobbies, right? To counter the stress. Try to find a hobby that involves motion. So you’re not just sitting doing something.
But you also have the exercise component as well. I mean, just think about like when you were a kid. I don’t know what they do nowadays. What are kids doing outside? Hopscotch. They’re swinging. They’re climbing in bars.

They’re running. But when you get a little older, high school, college, we no longer have playtime. We don’t have that ability to go on the playground and stretch our bodies, which is kind of weird. Not to mention when we start working, especially if you’re working in your house remotely or you’re going somewhere, boy, we don’t get a chance to take many breaks. So number one, frequent breaks. Highly recommended.
Number two, get some type of low back support for your car. And there are bigger lumbar supports that I also use to stretch my lower back, mainly at night just to keep that curve in there. I will put a link down below of some ideas for that as well. Because when you’re doing some more active stretching and trying to put that curve back in, this doesn’t do it. This only like maintains it. You want something a lot bigger, which you can just lay on there for like 20 or 30 minutes to really get that curve in, especially if you have sciatica or lower back pain.
And just as a side note, a lot of low back pain comes because you’re low in vitamin D. Don’t forget about that. Well, maybe you can get that if you take a break and go outside and get sun, right? That would be another thing to do. And I forgot about just walking.
Walking is so, so important to help counter this as well. Now, with your computer, you can get things that block this blue light. You can get glasses.
You can have a little thing that goes over your computer screen, which I have, and it blocks the blue light that’s coming off there. That would be a smart idea. You’ll find that your eyes get less tired from that. If you think about what sun is, it’s a full spectrum of different lights, including infrared. Blue light is just one. That’s not good for your exposure to your body.
So you should probably get some type of lamp or a full spectrum light that’s next to your computer if you’re there all day, just to get the entire spectrum of light that you’re exposed to. So that would be another suggestion. The other thing is the quantity of exercise. I think it’s really, really important to start looking at how much physical exercise, if it’s just an accumulation of steps, walking, or whatever. It’s very, very important to counter the long period of sitting. The more you sit in one position, the more exercise you need to do to counter it. And not just counter it, but build up your fitness. So you have this extra capacity to adapt to your environment. It really puts you in a much higher level of health than someone that’s just focusing on the diet and just the sleep.
So I think the combination of all these factors together will put you in a state of health where you have this extra reserve that you can live longer and counter all the things that come in on us, especially stress. And not to mention what it does to your deep cellular mitochondria. It actually helps you build more mitochondria and to help recycle old, damaged mitochondria.
Most disease relates to mitochondria. And so out of all the things that contribute to your health, the most, I think, exercise is right at the top of the list. But the cool thing is if you want to strategically be more efficient, just take your breaks. Just short breaks every hour. And that could be your exercise, right? So that way, at the end of the day, you’ve already got your exercise. All right.
As far as this EMF, what you want to do, you can get a device to measure how much EMF that’s around your environment. Or just right now, maybe just push all your computer stuff, especially underneath the desk, as far away as possible. And this thing right here, if you’re on the phone, use the speaker phone. And let’s say you’re on a call, you get up and walk. Get some exercise as you’re talking on the phone and keep this away from your head.
Because your brain is being bathed in electromagnetic fields. Your chair is very important. Find a flexible chair that you like, that you can move around and shift positions and do stretches and motion while you’re sitting there doing what you do. I mean, if you think about how much time you spend on your chair per day, it’s going to be worth it to spend some extra money on that. Just like your mattress should be a big investment as well. They even had things like a treadmill desk.
I mean, if you have a treadmill, there’s a desk on top of the treadmill so you can actually walk while you’re doing your work, which is pretty interesting. You also have standing desks, which you can rotate. There are little motors that you can stand and then bring it down and sit for a while and kind of break it up.