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The Effects of Poor Seated Posture

You must practice proper sitting posture if you want a healthy back and neck. When seated properly, your feet should be resting on the floor and your knees and hips bent 90 degrees, your lower back slightly arched, your breastbone lifted and your chin level. Imagine balancing a book on your head to achieve the right spine, chest and head position. Poor seated posture can have devastating long-term effects.

  1. Rounded Back

    • Unless you practice proper sitting posture you risk developing a rounded upper back or forward head posture because of structural changes in the spine, including degeneration of disks and joints, and lengthening or shortening of the supportive ligaments and muscles. The changes in the connective tissues can be difficult or even impossible to reverse, which is why many individuals who exhibit the postural abnormalities cannot be placed into proper postural alignment with short-term methods.

    Pain

    • Poor seated posture can lead to neck and shoulder pain, chronic headaches, temporomandibular joint (TMJ) dysfunction and contribute to low back pain. It can lead to tingling and numbness of the fingers and hands, and pain from tendinitis and tenosynovitis -- inflammation of a tendon sheath -- can result. Your tendons, blood vessels and nerves can be pulled and stretched over ligaments or bone where they can become pinched and restricted, resulting in pain.

    Starving Spine

    • Sitting for prolonged periods of time hampers the circulation of vital nutrients to the vertebral discs that make up your spine and, eventually, these discs dry out and lose their flexibility and suppleness. You are now likely to develop many problems with your spine, including degenerative disc disease, spinal stenosis, arthritis of the spine, disc herniation, and more. Practicing poor seated posture, particularly poor desk posture, increases the pressure on the discs, compressing them and further starving them from nutrients. Because of the increased pressure, more fluid moves out of the discs, along with precious nutrients, and hardly any fluid is able to move in to replenish this loss.

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