Is Sitting the New Smoking? How Posture Impacts Your Spine, Energy, and Longevity

Most people think poor posture just causes a sore neck or back pain — but it’s much deeper than that.
In this episode, Dr. Brant Hulsebus explains how modern sitting habits are changing our spinal health, affecting energy levels, and even influencing how our body ages.

You’ll learn:
✅ Why long hours of sitting slow down spinal motion and circulation
✅ How posture affects your nervous system and mood
✅ What “text neck” is doing to your spine over time
✅ 3 simple ways to reverse the damage starting today

Whether you’re a student, remote worker, or athlete — your spine’s health affects everything else. Tune in to find out what you can do to keep your body moving and your nervous system thriving.

🎧 Hosted by Dr. Brant Hulsebus, Hulsebus Rockford Chiropractic — serving Rockford for over 75 years.

📍 Learn more or schedule an appointment: https://hulsebuschiropractic.com

www.rockforddc.com

Transcript

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Hello, Dr. Brant Hulsebus here and welcome to another edition of Ask the Chiropractor. Ask The Chiropractor is my little podcast that I do when someone has a question about chiropractic or chiropractic care, I try to answer. I'm a chiropractor here in Rockford, Illinois. I'm a proud graduate of Palmer College of Chiropractic, and I'm happy to be the team chiropractor of the Rockford IceHogs. Let's dive into it. hi there. So last episode we talked about neck pain and neck stiffness. Today I want to talk about a sitting lifestyle is sitting the new smoking. I've heard of one chiropractor at one time, say that sitting to your spine is the same as sugar to your teeth. Sitting can just rot our spine inside and out. And I wanna break this into two different sections of how it affects us. First I want to talk about posture. When you sit, you roll your shoulders forward and your head protrudes out. We call that forward head posture and rounding of the thoracic spine. And if you do this long enough for enough of this, you actually start to see changes in the person. Whenever I sit, it's just natural position. The moment I sit, my shoulders come forward, my head comes out, whether I'm behind a desk, whether I am driving a car, whether I'm watching television, or no matter what I'm doing, whenever I'm sitting, I'm rolling my shoulders forward and my head's coming forward. Now this is a lot of stress on the spine. It's a lot of pulling and yanking and it creates a lot of downward pressure of the human skull. The human head weighs an average between eight to 10 pounds, and so that's, you have a nice round neck curve. That weight gets distributed evenly when you lose your neck curve and your head starts to go forward. That's not how we're biomechanically designed to hold their heads up. And so for every inch forward. The research shows it's 10 pounds more pressure pulling down. So as you pull down, you start to see more and more rounding going on over time, and this rounding of the shoulders and this forward of the head posture too long, we actually start to see muscular changes. When I see a patient come in with this, I often have 'em stand up and have their. Hips their heels and their shoulders touch a wall, then drive their head back. And I haven't put their arms out. And a lot of them complain about pulling in their sternum from their chest muscles that actually shrunk'cause they've been bunched up so much. Not only that, but in the backside your muscles are always being stretched more than they should be, and they're in a vulnerable position so they're easy to irritate 'cause you have a muscle now that's being stretched and you have a muscle now that's being overused 'cause it was already working overtime in the bad posture. Now you ask it to do more and those muscles become inflamed and inflamed muscles make adhesions. Because they get sticky and those adhesions become knots. So people describe all this aches and pains up in their shoulder blade, maybe underneath their shoulder. Or a lot of times they tell me it feels like a knuckle, trying to dig its way off from the inside. So we have is over time we see more and more of that forward head posture, more and more that rounding of the shoulders and long term, this will actually start to lead to degenerative changes in the spine. Meaning all that extra stress in that C five C six disc is gonna cause it to start to dehydrate and flatten, and it's gonna be too much stress. The body's gonna put down extra calcium around there. Think of it like a bony callous, but in reality, it's degenerative arthritis from the excessive stretching and stress over time from the head pulling it down all the time. Those are the nerves that come out, go down your arm into your fingertips. So when people tell me that their hand feels numb or weak or they feel like they just get this tingling all the time, I know they're starting off with a really bad forward head posture from sitting too much. And it's creating more and more issues. Now, one common thing I hear that's a lot is people on motorcycles, they'll tell me when they're on their motorcycle, they, we can really feel shoulder and neck pain. Or in the wintertime when they're on their snowmobile, they'll report the same thing because that position of those pieces of equipment really cause you to hunch and lean forward and create that posture and the extra stress of trying to maneuver and operate the vehicle while in that posture. So as chiropractors, we like to take x-rays from the side to see what your posture's doing to give us a clue. And if I take a sideways view of your neck and I see that the C five and C six six discs are really thin, then I know you've had really bad posture for a really long time. It's creating a lot of issues on these area, and I know it might take longer to get you where you want your health to be based on the fact that it's been there for a long time. And a lot of people see the old lady at church all hunched over that big hump in her back, and they'll tell me, that's osteoporosis that's scoliosis. No, that's really bad. Forward head posture for way too long if running on the shoulders and the head sticking out over time. And as we age, our bones lose some of their integrity and we start to see more and more of that aging going down like that. So that is not. Osteoporosis, people with weak bones, it would happen faster. However, if the head was back, I would theorize that wouldn't happen. So the posture is a huge thing that chiropractors look at when we evaluate you and try to help you. But let's talk about phase two of this. I said there was two problems with sitting all the time. Genetically speaking, we are hunters and gatherers. We are designed to be on the move and on the go. Our ancestors were all hunters and gatherers, no matter what part of the world you came from. And a hunter I gather, would walk around the earth. They'd pick fruits and vegetables and eat healthy fats and kill small animals. But most importantly, they would wanna avoid the big animals that might want to eat them like a bear or a wolf or a lion. So our ancestors couldn't hurt themselves. And sit around for a few days and heal.'cause they would get eaten by an animal. They would be attacked by a predator. So we are designed to heal on the go. We're designed our backs to approve as we move. What do I mean by that? A lot of your joints of your back have no direct blood supply. There's nothing directly pushing nutrients in or pulling toxins out. The only way this happens is when you get up and you move when you walk and you move the muscles around your spine, they contract and they pushed the good stuff into those joints and pulled the bad stuff out a while back, I did a podcast about a vice we gave patients 40 years ago compared to what we know today. And 40 years ago. If you ran a jackhammer, then you're. Back was getting destroyed. They would tell you, you should probably get a desk job. It's probably time to get off your feet. And we found out those patients rapidly deteriorated. So that was not the best advice we could have gave them at that time. That's what we knew at the time though. We learned it was better to get up and move around. Actually, we always knew it was better to get up and move around. We were just following somebody else's model.'cause if you go back to the earliest chiropractic textbooks from the 1920s, you'll see that they were told to get up and move around. My chiropractor in the Quad cities, after he'd adjust me, he'd have me do two laps around his building in order to help me hold my adjustment better. We know that getting up and moving is a way to get those muscles that. To start putting the good stuff in and pulling the bad stuff out and stimulating that healing process. Matter of fact, that's what we do as chiropractors. We find the bones that are subluxated. Now, what's the subluxation? A subluxation is when one or two of your vertebras are misaligned and under stress and they're not moving properly, the body will lock them up to protect them, to keep them from causing more damage.'cause every time they create more inflammation, it hits that nerve. And wherever that nerve goes, that body pars affected. Like I talked about in your neck, if the C five and C six vertebraes are subluxated, there's gonna be the misalignment, the stress, the body's gonna lock it up, which is gonna make it more hyper inflammatory, meaning that it's easier to get mad when it gets mad. The nerves shoot down that. C five, C six into your hands and fingertips. We see decreased reflexes in certain parts of your hand. We see decreased hand strength. We see decreased grip strength. We see muscle pain, burning, tingling, numbness going on your arm and us a medicine degree a thousand percent on this. Not only that, but we'd also to get a piece of cotton in or sharp pinwheel and go up and down your arm and ask you if that's sharp or soft. And whenever we see the subluxation, a lot of times we find these areas will give us feedback in that. It. But as chiropractors, we also know these body go to body parts organs besides just muscles and skin that also goes to an organ. And your C five C six has a lot to do with your thyroid and some of the glands in your throat and your neck. So if you're somebody that always has a sore throat, this and that, it's very possible that a chiropractic adjustment to your C five C six could be what's, it's limiting your healing potential that you should have in these areas. So with the subluxation, there again. Now we have a subluxation at C five C six. We have the bad forward head posture all weighing down, and that's why that one can rapidly deteriorate. So when you go to that chiropractor, we look up and down your spine looking for these subluxations, and we do a chiropractic adjustment to'em hopefully to restore the motion. Once we restore the motion, then we know the muscles around there, we'll contract and move and start pushing the good stuff in, pulling the bad stuff out, which is why it's so important that you get up and walk all the time. So sitting all day is, that's gonna totally destroy and rot your spine. So is sitting the new smoking, I would say sitting's always been the smoking and it's always been a problem. We should, we're designed to heal and go on to move. So what do we do as an everyday answer? So if you've had a lot of back pain, you always feel tired and fatigued, had a lot of health issues. You should probably go see a chiropractor. When you go to the chiropractor. That chiropractor should take x-rays of your spine to see exactly what we're working with. What do those discs look like? Now, we can't see the disc on the x-ray, but we can see the gap where the disc should be. If there's no gap, we have to imagine the disc is not looking very good. So we take the x-rays to see what's going on with the alignment and only that, but the posture and the disc height and the overall health of the spine. Based on that, a chiropractor will come up with a care plan for you. It'll probably start off with a series of adjustments. I did a previous podcast where the research shows it takes 12 chiropractic adjustments to create a change in the spine. So be prepared not to come in once, not to come in twice, but be prepared to come in probably around 12 times if you wanna see a change in your spine. I know when I first started practice, a lot of the old farts would come in and say, if you can't fix it once, I don't want to sue you. I said, then good luck. See you later. It's the same thing as going to a gym. You can't get in shape going one time. Same thing as going to physical therapy. You're not gonna repair a damaged joint by going to physical therapy one time and tell 'em to do and do it right. That's just not how things work anymore. So you go to the chiropractor, you get your x-rays, you have your chiropractic exam, and the chiropractor will give you a schedule now. Probably somewhere along the way, some posture stuff will be introduced and some posture exercises will be introduced. My simplest favorite one is just having you stand up, stick your chest out big, retract your chin backwards. And then follow a line back and forth by turning your head, not moving your eyes, but turning your head side to side. This is a neurological and muscular skeletal reeducation to fix your posture. I've done several podcasts about the fact that when I went to school, we learned about skeletal muscle, smooth muscle, and cardiac muscle. But the newest research is showing there's a fourth type of muscle called stabilization muscles. In a cadaver, your stabilization muscles around your spine look just like your skeletal muscle, but under a microscope, they're very different. The neurological connections are totally different. There's neurological connections in your skeletal muscle that your brain can consciously control, like moving your arm. However, this skeletal muscle, the stabilization muscles, they don't have that simple proof. Right now, if you're listening to me, I want you to move the third lumbar, the third bone in your lower back, just moving independently without moving anything else. You can't. But there's a ton of muscles around that vertebrae. So why can't you move it?'cause these muscles around there behave differently than your other skeletal muscle. They are reflex toward, they are reactionary muscles. They are highly, highly, highly innervated muscles. They have a ton of neurological connections within them to balance 'em. So if you want to change our posture, we have to do it not only with our actual physical posture, but also neurological input to help those muscles respond better. I. Our clinic's been here since 1949 and we have a whole bunch of stuff down in our basement of different traction units harnesses and different things that we've used over the years. And recently I've had the most success by not only doing a. A musculoskeletal type of exercise, but incorporating a neurological in it with as well. And that's been taken off huge and people have been getting some really cool success with that. So I'm a really big fan of including that component of regaining your posture. The neurology is so important. I always say it's chiropractor as we work on your nerves through your spine. We're not so much spinal doctors as we want to influence your nervous system. So there you have, it is sitting the new smoking. Sugar to your teeth is the same as sitting to your spine. Absolutely. Quick tip for you. Get up every 20 minutes and walk around. Get up every 20 minutes, squeeze your shoulder blades together, count to 10, take a couple steps and go back at it. Sitting's not going away. So we have to adapt to this sitting lifestyle. And like I said, if you've had stiffness, pains, those muscle knots, headaches. You just don't feel like your health is where you're supposed to be. You feel tired and run down all the time, no matter how much you sleep or how much time off you get. Probably time to go see a chiropractor. I hope you enjoy this episode of Sitting the New Smoking. If you did, make sure you like and subscribe. Show us all your friends, and if you have a question about chiropractic or chiropractic care, there's only one qualified person that can answer your question, and that's a chiropractor. So feel free to leave a comment wherever you're watching or listening. This. Maybe next week you'll be the question of the week on my podcast. Ask the chiropractor. Thanks for tuning in.