PAIN, Reading Between the LINES!
Per autonomous.ai, Extended periods of sitting have been related to health issues such as obesity and metabolic syndrome, a group of disorders characterized by high blood pressure, high blood sugar, extra body flab around the waist, and high cholesterol levels. (Bolding is mine) Ahhh ha! Now I have the reason for my current situation – high blood pressure and an extra 60 pounds. It’s NOT because of the nachos and beer consumed while couch potato-ing during an NFL-riddled Sunday or the chocolate-chip muffins grabbed as I head for the office. It’s because of my DESK!
Proper posture? Autonous.ai says to “visualize a string tugging up from the bottom of your waist and out the center of your head. When you're exercising great posture, you should experience that degree of elevation and alignment all of the time.” Do you feel such tugging?
Autonomous.ai goes on to discuss the benefits of an adjustable standing desk and the need to take care of your neck, back, legs, wrists, arms, and eyes. Proper height, standing pads, tilted keyboards, arm pads, lighting. Great thoughts – and after a multi-decade desk-based career, I CONCUR! I have been using a standing desk for the past month and its transformative! Give it a try if you can.
To reclaim my creative juices, I have been working through some people sketching tutorials. They have you start by drawing a basic “stick figure.”
- Oval as the head
- Rounded rectangle for chest cavity
- Circle for shoulders
- Line segments for arms, circles of arm joints and hands
- Oval for pelvis
- Line segments for legs, circles for leg joints and feet
- A line connecting the head to chest cavity (for the neck)
- A line connecting chest cavity to the pelvis
And it hit me! Per www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov, Among adults, 60% to 80% will experience back pain and 20% to 70% will experience neck pain that interferes with their daily activities during their lifetimes. Harvard Health says, Neck aches are often the result of wear and tear, poor posture, and weak core muscles. It’s those darn lines! Those lines - that connect the head to the chest cavity and the chest cavity to the pelvis - are the 2 places in the human body where there is no exoskeleton! Those lines! “The human head weighs 8 pounds”, or so says the cute blond kid in Jerry McGuire, is a real life bobble-head without proper stability. I never thought of the vulnerability of the abdomen before the sketching exercise. It’s why all the articles and focus on THE CORE.
Thankfully I am not experiencing back or neck pain, knee or hip joint pain like so many adults around me; but I now recognize that IF I don’t change my ways it’s only a matter of time! Harvard Health says, that “as we age, we develop degenerative changes, very often in the spine. The structures of the bones and cartilage are subject to wear and tear. Very often, we are able to completely control and eliminate symptoms with the appropriate core exercise.” At work, on our “Chat” feed, my 50-something boss is self-deprecatingly joking that he is committed to the 8-minute plank with the 20-somethings in the office. Cripes – I doubt I can do a 30-second plank!
My resolution for this year is to make better choices for my long-term health – lose weight, employ better posture, and develop core strength to ward off the inevitable effects of aging. How about you?