The Easiest Way to Sit Up Straight

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Sitting up straight is something we’ve all been told to do since we were little kids and for some reason it just seems so freaking hard to do. It actually is pretty fatiguing to sit up straight if you don’t set yourself up correctly.

Let’s get this out of the way: there is research to show that ‘poor posture’ doesn’t correlate with pain. However, many of the people I work with have a resolution of symptoms when we change how they sit for prolonged periods of time. You can’t blame everything on posture, but when you have empirical evidence (aka person has pain sitting slouched, they sit up straight and pain improves) that a change in sitting posture reduces back or neck symptoms and allows you to exercise at the end of the day and feel better, I will take that all day long.

I digress.

With that said, let’s talk about the easiest way to sit up straight. If you approach the chair haphazardly and sit with your butt tucked under, you set yourself up for a challenge in sitting up straight.

You have to set the base up correctly, which involves sitting more on your hamstrings instead of the meat of your butt. If you set the base correctly, everything else above (low back, mid back, neck) becomes much easier to handle. See the video for all the details! Text cannot adequately describe what a video can easily show.

It’s important to note that there really is no ‘perfect’ sitting posture. No matter the way you sit, you are stressing something. It is effective to change positions frequently to distribute load to different tissues. A good standard is to get up out of the chair every 20 minutes and mildly shift your sitting position every 10 minutes. For some people, though, sitting up straight is the only well-tolerated position and the video shows the easiest way to do that!