Gallo - Posture Pain: Key Strategies to Stay Pain Free at Your Desk and in Life

I have written this in order to guide people with desk jobs who are struggling day in and day out with aches and pains. Most often, these small aches and pains are curable; however, the person who suffers from them will feel like they are not. I often hear things such as, Oh I just have a bad neck, or Eh, Im just getting old. Having been a board-certified Doctor of Physical Therapy for some time now, I can tell you that these are poor reasons for a persons pain. Despite prior injuries and your age, you can always implement simple strategies to achieve a life of less discomfort and in most cases, no discomfort at all.

One type of people that I commonly treat are those who sit at a desk all day, or so they tell me. Believe it or not, in my experience, sitting for a prolonged period of time can put you in extreme discomfort and do more harm than other occupations. In most of the diagnoses I treat, there is often a culprit and a victim. What I mean is that I take into consideration the cause of a persons pain and the body part that is affected and starts to feel painful. In the case of desk jobs, I like to call sitting all day the culprit because it leads to a persons pain. Therefore, I like to refer to somebodys pain caused by sitting all day as the victim that is hurting due to the culprit.

In order for me to treat a person effectively, it is important that I treat the person as a whole. It is very simple to give a person stretch exercises and send them on their way; however, as a Physical Therapist I like to prevent these pains from coming back. As I commonly say, Treat the culprit AND the victim. I want to teach people to sit in optimal postures and provide them with additional strategies that prevent discomfort. For the best results, Ive treated the area that is hurting while providing people with strategies to keep them comfortable. Therefore, I would like to provide you with some tips and strategies that correct the daily routines causing these aches and pains. I hope that you will find this guide informative and easy to follow.

Before we begin, I would like to explain to you why bad posture at your desk can be detrimental to your well-being. When you engage in bad posture, you place your body in positions that it is not meant to be in. Doing this causes different areas of your body to hurt, and over time causes things to break down. I like to refer to a persons posture as the foundation to the house. A house foundation is essential to how a house looks and how stable it is. If a houses foundation has issues, it compromises the structure of the house and becomes one hell of a problem (not to mention an expensive one). I want you to think of your body as the house and your posture as its foundation. Without optimal posture, you may be prone to detrimental injuries down the road. My goal is to prevent that with this guide.

I would like to share some research on this subject because that is a crucial starting point. In a study by Nejati et al., the subjects working postures were compared to their forward-looking postures. The researchers concluded that the employees not only had defective postures but that improper posture was also more severe in employees that suffered from neck pain (1). I often use this study to show people the importance of posture correction because it can be applied to all office workers. I can also tell you that this is not the only study that shows the correlation between bad posture and pain. Therefore, I want to outline ways to improve your posture at work and during other activities, and give you key strategies to staying pain-free.

Finally, I would like to point out that I offer free educational videos showing exercises that improve posture on my YouTube channel Physical Therapy 101. This channel was started to provide free, to-the-point exercises to patients and practitioners. This channel is continuously being updated and provides a slew of information spanning several diagnoses, so please subscribe if you are interested. Supplemental information can be found on our website www.physicaltherapy101.net . Now, lets talk about posture!