Most of the 9-5 jobs today include sitting on your chair for eight hours straight or even longer. Then, when you come home, you want to sit again out of exhaustion from work and the daily commute. But sitting excessively at every opportunity you get can be as dangerous to your health as smoking. Here’s how;
When you’re too close to being a couch potato all day, it is known as the sedentary lifestyle. Most of us, although being productive at what we do, have a sedentary lifestyle that includes a lot of sitting at chairs and tables working for long durations. This lifestyle leads to body damaging effects that can sometimes be irreversible. For which you may have to visit a physio clinic. Sitting for long durations or not moving from the couch at all affects both the mind and body. Once you have access to everyday comfort, there are very few of us who get bored and go out for a walk or a run. But doing so affects the physiology of your body.
The muscles in your legs and bums (the gluteal muscles) are responsible for making you stand upright and to keep you stabilized while walking. When you are a person that sits for 18 hours in 24 hours, these muscles get affected the most. Weakening or wasting away from the leg and gluteal muscles are one of the most serious effects of a sedentary lifestyle. You become more prone to falling on minimum destabilization and spraining when you walk long distances. Though physio clinics have treatments to muscle sprains, its regularity can make you depressed in a while.
The food that we eat every day is the source of energy for the body to function. If you don’t move a muscle during the day, you retain the energy that keeps you running. When you move your muscles, the food in your body gets synthesized into them. The sugars and fats that you eat are then burned up from the movement of muscles. So when you sit for long hours without exercising, you give a call to obesity.
Just like the leg and gluteal muscles, the hips are also prone to a lot of dangers when you have a sedentary lifestyle, the demands of your hip of walking are much more than your legs. The hip and back muscles are the most vulnerable parts of your body to get affected by long hours of sitting. Physio clinics see a lot of patients every day that have problems with their hip flexor muscles and patients of pelvic floor dysfunction. The improper postures of sitting affect your back muscles as well as the spinal cord. Degeneration of your spinal discs becomes easier when you sit with a wrong posture. Problems like stiff neck and shoulders trouble you often.
So the next time you decide to have Netflix and chill at home for the weekend, remember to go out and have a run around the block to save yourself from the terrors of sitting for long hours. If you are concerned with some kind of a pain in your muscles or back and the hip, contact the physio clinic in Edmonton for physiotherapy advice.