Broken Back: How to Help Your Posture at a Desk Job

 

Spending all day in a seated position can devastate your posture over time. People who work in offices often find their posture slowly deteriorating, and has been known to cause pain, sap your energy, and cut off your circulation. When you combine this with the hazards of remaining seated for a long time, your office job can be a hazard to your health. It takes a while to improve your sitting posture, but we’ve compiled some tips to help make the process a little easier.

 

Buy A Wrist Rest

A wrist rest helps you reduce the stress you put on your wrists when typing. The rests do this by helping you avoid awkward hand positions which can affect your back. Use your rests by keeping your hands and wrists above them when typing and take strain off of your arms, shoulders and forearms. This will greatly improve your posture while you type.

 

Rest Your Feet Correctly

A chair that makes it hard for you to comfortably rest your feet on the ground is a recipe for disaster when it comes to your posture. Adjust your chair so you can comfortably rest your feet flat on the ground when sitting. This aligns your back, and it prevents you from slouching. If your chair is too high for you to properly adjust it, get creative and use a small stool or a stack of books to rest your feet on.

 

Get A Good Chair

A chair from a high-quality furniture supplier like Alexander Brothers Ltd can easily help you fix your posture. Look for a chair that provides lumbar support, you can rest your feet on the ground comfortably, and your knees are level with your hips when seated. If you experience pain and posture problems, your chair should be one of the first places you look. Find an office furniture store in Honolulu HI or similar place where they can help you find something perfect for your stature.

 

Adjust Your Monitor

Adjusting your monitor helps you straighten out your posture by relieving stress on your neck and shoulders. Make sure your monitor is straight in front of you, and adjust it until it is slightly below eye level; this helps you keep your neck in a natural position while working, and does wonders for your posture.

 

Good posture isn’t something that comes naturally, but with a little work, you can adjust it enough to prevent the health risks that come along with staying seated for long stretches of time. Follow our simple tips, and you’ll notice your posture improve with almost no effort.

 

Categories: back, chair, desk, Neck, spine, Stress, Wellness

How to Get Sexier Abs By Doing Some Simple Exercises

One of the biggest weight and fitness goals that women have is to tone up their abs. Having a flat, toned and sexy stomach seems like a direct route to sexual wellness and wellbeing, and so women are often desperate to find that magic formula to help them achieve these.

 

Not all exercises lead to nicer abs, however, and you need to ensure that you are targeting your core muscles if you want to have that movie star and athlete style of flat, toned tummy.

 

First of all – you need to be doing cardio work and burning off fat. Coupled with a low fat, healthy diet, this is one of the keys to having nicer abs. You can do all the tummy work you like, but unless there is no fat at all on top of your abs, it’s going to be very hard to see the definition you’ve created in the muscle. Cardio needs to be serious, fat-burning exercise and your diet needs to be healthy and nutritious to reduce body fat as you build muscles.

 

The first exercise you should try is the belly button to the spine move. Wherever you are and whatever position you are in, be it lying down in bed, sitting in the bath or at your desk at work, you should practise pulling your belly button in towards the spine on a daily basis. This trains your tummy to be naturally pulled in in the middle. Just make sure that your spine is straight when you do the exercise, and then imagine that a cord is pulling your belly button backwards towards your spine.

 

Downward dog with a plank is also a move that you should perfect to improve your abs. Start by lying on the stomach and pulling up into a plank position, where you support your body on your elbows and toes, and then pull your bottom up towards the ceiling, whilst keeping your abs tight. Keep switching between plank and downward dog for tight and toned abs.

Categories: Abs, belly button, Downward Dog, exercise, flat toned, nbsp, nicer abs, spine, stomach, toned, tummy, work

Sex After Spine Surgery: Is It Possible?

You might thank of having spinal surgery as a very serious procedure – especially as it is mainly done to people later in life. Indeed, there are certain spinal deformities that come with age that require surgery on them. It doesn’t seem like a great combination, does it? The advancing age along with the clear spinal problems that has necessitated surgery. So it would be easy to believe that after the surgery is completed, there would be no chance of a normal sex life resuming. However, now it seems that these preconceived notions might be wrong, and there may be a happy ending waiting for spinal surgery patients and their sex lives after all.

 

The good news comes in the form of a new study. In this study a team of surgeons from the University of Virginia Health Center in Charlottesville looked into the sexual function of 62 patients who were 50 years and older and who had received extensive spinal surgery to deal with age-related problems – and the results might be surprising. It seems that the team found out that it is indeed highly possible for older people to achieve satisfactory sexual function and enjoy their sex lives despite having this surgery. This is good news, as surgery is often thought of as a drastic procedure that could have lasting damage on your ability to live your life the way you did before the surgery.

 

In the study, the surgery was described as using spinal instrumentation. This instrumentation would be considered a device or a serious of complex devices such as screws, hooks, rods, wires, cables, plates or spinal cage, which is attached to vertebrae of spine to help to deal with or correct some sort of deformity and instability of the spine. These types of instruments and surgery are used in patients who suffer with spinal disorders caused by advanced age, but could also be used for those who suffer from congenital defects, illness, or trauma.

 

It was suggested by the study that it is well known that weakness or deformity of the spine is a fairly common sign of aging and can be seen in many older people. The authors were even able to cite another study that reported that the likelihood of spinal deformity in the elderly might be as high as 68 per cent. This is a truly huge number when you consider that the number of elderly people is always increasing thanks to healthier lifestyles and a better understanding of how to treat our bodies right. Nevertheless, this spinal deformity often appears to be purely a natural symptom of age that we can do nothing about.

 

Indeed, it could be argued that as the baby-boomer section of the population naturally moves toward the status of being ‘elderly’, more and more surgeries will likely need to be performed to correct spinal deformity and improve their quality of life as they inexorably get older. And it is certainly true that sexual function is a very important aspect of health-related quality of life. However, it always appears to have been largely overlooked as an important factor in older adults with spinal instrumentation. The surgeons who are authors of this paper made it their goal to examine whether and how spinal instrumentation affects these patients’ sexual function and contributes in that way to their quality of life.

 

Overall, it is clear that the patients who require spinal surgery can lead a normal and healthy sex life after they have had spinal instrumentation inserted inside them. This is naturally very good news for their quality of life.

Categories: Sex, sex lives, sexual function, spinal deformity, spinal instrumentation, spinal surgery, spine, surgery

How Can Desk Yoga Help to Relieve that Painful Posture?

Not only does the back, neck and shoulder pain of poor pressure affect your health and wellbeing, but your corporate wellness can also suffer. Slouching into a C-shape at your desk, instead of going for the slight S of a healthy spine, has a negative impact on your productivity, and so there’s more reason than ever to sort it out. You may not have time to make it to a yoga class, but you shouldn’t let that stop you!

 

Seattle-based yoga instructor Michael Huffman says, ‘The human body was built to move more than sit in a chair, car and couch for a large chunk of the day.’ Not only does it ache like hell, but leaning too far forward to look at your computer monitor compress your cartilage. According to yoga instructor Sandy Blaine, author of Yoga for Computer Users, ‘No matter how good your posture is, when you’re sitting at a desk all day, your muscles are working very hard to hold your spine up, so just releasing tension from those muscles and allowing them to stretch takes a lot of pressure off the spine and is also energising.’

 

So which yoga poses can sort your posture out, even if you never leave your desk?

 

1. Seated Spinal Twist. Blaine explains that this pose is beneficial in ‘releasing back tension that collects when you’re holding a seated position all day.’

 

2. Forward Bend, or the Seated Uttanasana. Huffman notes, ‘Forward bending brings fresh oxygen to the brain and puts some needed space in the rear section of the spinal disks.’

 

3. Hands Alive. You may recognise this pose if you’ve done yoga before, as it is a variation on Urdhva Hastasana or upward facing salute. This one is vastly beneficial to your wellness, as it works to stretch your shoulders and armpits, relieve your mild of anxiety and improve the circulation in your back and arms.

 

4. “I dream of Genie.” Blaine comments, ‘Everyone has tight thoracic spinal muscles – the rhomboids and paraspinals that run along the spine between the shoulder blades. [This pose] breaks up tension in these muscles.’

Categories: desk, nbsp, posture, spine, yoga, yoga instructor

This is Spinal Tap: How Acupuncture Heals Most Conditions

You’d be surprised how often your spine affects your wellness. Spine problems may be the underlying cause for your liver disease, back problems, headaches, eye problems, sinus issues or heart problems, but it could take ages for your doctor to pinpoint this. However, according to Dr. Lijuan Sun, a complementary wellness expert and practitioner, all of your nerves pass through your spine, which can affect your wellbeing with anything from asthma to arthritis.

 

‘I’ve had patients who have asked me why I knew so much about a particular area of the body even though it’s not my specialization,’ says Dr Sun, who is a licensed acupuncturist at Cupertino Centre Acupuncture. ‘In Chinese medicine you don’t study the body part by part. Everything is related.’ Dr Sun notes a recent case in which a patient had inflamed joints due to arthritis. Instead of following her doctor’s advice to take painkillers and go for a run every day – which was near-impossible as her knees were swollen to the point where she was unable to walk – the patient went to see Dr Sun and her knees were completely healed after six sessions of acupuncture.

 

Dr Sun explains that not knowing the origin of your pain can be detrimental to your wellbeing. According to Dr Sun, she recently advised a man with numbness in his hands against hand surgery. The man’s doctor had recommended surgery even though he didn’t know what was causing the numbness in his hand, and Dr Sun said she knew which places in the spine were related to the nerves of the man’s hand, and she thought hand surgery would not be the way to cure it. However, the man went ahead with the surgery anyway, which ended up causing further damage to his hand, and now it is paralysed.

 

However, it’s not just acupuncture that Dr Sun knows so much about – she also creates her own herbal medicine. She commented, ‘I never buy even pre-made Chinese medicine,’ as this way she ensures that everything is natural. However, even though she makes it herself, Dr Sun uses Chinese herbs that have been used to promote health and balance for thousands of years. She says, ‘I really like Chinese medicine, it’s so efficient. I’ve always liked Chinese medicine. I walk around with a needle in my pocket and if I have a problem—it’s taken care of. What’s better than that?’

Categories: acupuncture, origins, spine

Most Common Causes of Neck and Spine Pain

Neck and spine pain can be common occurrences for many individuals, and you’ll find a number of factors contributing to the pain and discomfort. Treatment can be as simple as a chiropractic realignment and inflammation medication or as challenging as surgery.

 

What is Neck Pain?

 

Pain or discomfort associated with your neck or spine can be serious for some individuals. There are a number of sources at the center of the pain which can include whiplash, herniated disc, degenerative disc disease, and neck strain. It can also come from diseases or illnesses such as meningitis, tuberculosis, and fibromyalgia. A physician can assess the areas for damages and implement the right treatment plan based on your injury.

 

Sources of Neck and Spine Pain

 

There are a number of factors that can contribute to your neck and spine pain. Individuals who overuse their muscles by lifting weights, working in the yard, and sitting hunched over in front of the computer can suffer a muscle strain. Your body can also suffer wear and tear as you age and osteoarthritis can develop throughout your neck area. Illnesses and diseases can also cause neck pain and can include rheumatoid arthritis, meningitis, tuberculosis and cancer.

 

Other things such as whiplash from a vehicle accident can require a significant recovery treatment plan due to the severe pain and discomfort. When the vehicle is hit at a high rate of speed, your neck tissue is stretched beyond its normal limit. Car accident injuries are particularly stressful, and you may be due compensation to help you get well. Whether you need to contact a Florida, Kansas, or New York accident lawyer, there are people whose job is to help you get the funds you need to recover.

 

Treatment

 

Depending on the type of injury and pain that you’re going through, you can treat your neck injury in a number of ways. A physician should diagnose your pain first and can offer a number of tips for treatment. Something less severe can be treated through simple at home methods. Applying heat by way of a heating pad, bathing in warm water or a hot shower can soothe the pain and distress. Pain relievers such as acetaminophen or non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs can reduce inflammation and lessen your discomfort.

 

Exercise

 

Exercises to strengthen the spine and neck areas may also be beneficial, but you need to go slow. Keeping the area mobile is your primary goal, and you may have to take gradual steps to achieve that level. Deep tissue massage therapy or a chiropractic alignment can also soothe and strengthen your body. By concentrating on the areas where you’re experiencing the most discomfort, a massage therapist can work out the knots and tension.

 

Most expect an easy fix in one treatment, but you may need to schedule a number of appointments until you begin to experience relief. Individuals with cancerous tumors or more serious problems associated with the neck area may be required to have surgery. This is typically a last resort and a second opinion should always be discussed before you go under the knife.

 

Stiffness, soreness and being unable to move the neck is a common problem suffered by many, especially those injured in a car accident. Fortunately, most individuals find relief from the pain within four to six weeks. However, for those whose pain fails to disappear, you may need further consultation to get at the root of the problem.

 

Savannah Bobo is a blog contributor and freelance writer from northwest Georgia who has experience neck and spine pain and soreness from car accidents and work-induced injury. If experiencing pain and soreness from an accident, New York accident lawyers at the Perecman firm have experience with construction, malpractice, and car accident cases in their state, and can help you by answering your questions with concern and diligence.

Categories: car accident, meningitis tuberculosis, most common causes of neck and spine pain, Neck, neck area, neck pain, Pain, pain nbsp, spine, spine pain, york accident