Sit up and pay more attention to your back

David Higgins10 April 2012

Any exercise class worth the entrance fee will pay close attention to your posture as you work out. But it's all too easy to adopt a "what happens in the gym stays in the gym" approach.

And while we may leave our session standing straight and tall, some of those bad postural habits can be back before we've even left the changing room.

If we're to benefit from all that focus on correct form and alignment, it's important that we carry these principles into our everyday life and activities.

One area where postural amnesia kicks in most often is sitting. How we sit can be detrimental to our posture and back health - and given that most people spend too much time sitting, doing it badly is just adding insult to potential injury.

So do you sit (a) on your sitting bones with your lower back gently curved in the opposite direction or (b) slumped on your tailbone so your lower back rounds into a C-shaped curve? A) is good. (b) is bad, bad, bad. It increases the pressure in our lumbar discs, which over time could contribute to the degeneration of these vital shock-absorbers.

Prolonged slump sitting can also stretch the back's protective ligaments, leaving a window of opportunity for the kind of tweak from a minor movement that can send you limping to the osteopath.

If you're reading this on the bus or Tube (assuming you've been lucky enough to get a seat), now's the perfect time to check how you are sitting.

First find your sit bones. They're the bony lumps deep in your bum muscles. Go on. See if you can feel them - it's all right; no one's looking.

Once you've found them, make sure the weight of your upper body is going through them rather than your coccyx. That's all it takes to align your posture correctly, and enable your spine to maintain its natural curves with far less strain.

Simple, isn't it? They're not called sit bones for nothing.

David Higgins is co-founder of TenPilates (tenpilates.com)

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