Episode 5: The Ergonomic Advantage – Why Sitting is the New Smoking

## Episode 5: The Ergonomic Advantage – Why Sitting is the New Smoking

We have all heard the phrase "sitting is the new smoking." In the chiropractic world, we like to say that sitting to your spine is the same as sugar to your teeth! 

In Part 5 of our 12-week "Wellness Lifecycle" series, Dr. Brant Hulsebus explores the hidden, structural dangers of desk jobs and modern convenience. While today's ultra-comfortable chairs might save our lower backs, they are wreaking havoc on our cervical spines and overall neurological health.

### In this episode, you’ll learn:
* The Evolution of Chairs: Why modern seating allows us to sit longer, but forces our shoulders to roll forward and destroys our neck posture .
* Starving Your Spine: How sitting stops the muscular "pump" your discs rely on for nutrients, leading directly to dehydrated discs and Degenerative Disc Disease .
* The Windsor Autopsies: The fascinating story of how a medical study designed to disprove chiropractors accidentally validated them instead .
* Losing Your Balance: The science behind your body's hidden "stability muscles" and why desk workers are losing them.
* The 20-Minute Reset: A simple, actionable stretching routine (and a clever water bottle trick) to protect your posture during the workday .

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### About the Host
Dr. Brant Hulsebus is a proud graduate of Palmer College of Chiropractic and serves as the team chiropractor for the Rockford IceHogs. Practicing at Hulsebus Rockford Chiropractic, he is dedicated to helping patients overcome modern physical stressors through neurologically-based chiropractic care.

### Join the Journey
This is Part 5 of our 12-week series. Subscribe to follow along as we build your complete roadmap to spinal health and peak performance!

Have a question?
If you are dealing with neck pain, shoulder tension, or hand numbness from sitting at a desk, ask a chiropractor ! Leave a comment or contact our Rockford clinic.

Connect with us:
* Website: https://hulsebuschiropractic.com
* Location: 1877 Daimler Road, Rockford, IL 61112

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Next Week: We are shifting our focus to the one group of people who need to get up and move more than anyone else: expecting mothers! Join us for Episode 6 as we discuss Chiropractic Care During Pregnancy

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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. Hello and welcome to episode five of our 12 episode series. Last time we talked a little bit about sports and performance, and I talked a little bit about, , I like to jokingly call hockey back because of their job. They always have one shoulder higher than the other shoulder. That's how you carry the hockey stick. When I X-ray players, I can tell you if they're left or right-handed by the way, their x-rays look. But let's talk about you and me. We're not hockey players. We're not professional hockey players, but let's talk about ergonomics, right? That's a big thing today. So we just break into ergonomics., A lot of people say sitting to your spines the same as sugar to your teeth. Other people say sitting is the new smoking., In a previous episode, I talked a little bit about when my grandfather was a chiropractor. He started practicing in 19, late 1940s. And back then a lot of people had lower back pain. Lower back pain was a real bad issue. And if you ever go into an older car or an older chair or next time you're at the museum , or like some kind of throwback area, look at those chairs. Those chairs were awful. I ride an old Jeep or an old pickup truck and I don't want to be in there very long because it's starts to hurt your lower back., Today we've got amazing chairs. I was in a F-150 pickup truck with chair massagers built in., They got everything nowadays. So we are able to sit a lot longer now and not develop a lower back pain, and that's been a real positive for our lower back. However, you always gotta pay the piper, right? The cervical spine has dramatically suffered because of this. because now when we sit, we roll our shoulders forward or head comes out, and we're not meant to be in a 90 degree position for eight hours a day. We're meant to get up and move around. Let's talk about first the posture problems. The first, the posture problem is more and more people come to me and tell me they get this pain going from their shoulder up into their neck. And the thing about this area is inter each your arms in your hands, like they talk about carpal tunnel and fingers going numb and elbow and wrist problems. But remember the first episode we talked about the subluxation and how in your spines misalign, it affects muscles, skin tone. But also body parts, organs, and this junction where your neck and thoracic spine, where your ribs are, comes together., Not that one part of your spine is more important than another, but where this comes together, this is where all the nerves that go to your heart and your lungs comes from. So people with AFib, people with respiratory problems. This is an area that a chiropractor want to adjust to take care of. Now, I'm not saying that all AFib and respiratory problems are because of this. I'm saying this doesn't make those better. This can upset those. And again, if you have AFib, don't tow your cardiologist. I quit. I'm gonna go to the chiropractor. They can fix AFib. That's not what I'm saying. What I'm saying is, when this air in your spine's under stress,, it, it adds to the stress everywhere those nerves go. So if you've been doing this for a long time, you've had bad nerves going to your heart and lungs for a long time, those body parts over time start to suffer from this. Just like if the same nerve that goes to my heart and lungs also goes down to the part of my hand. We have you grip something and we notice it's been there a long time. because your grip isn't as strong on one side and the other. So it's the same thing if it's going to a body part. Matter of fact, uh, in my dad's time, they tried to prove chiropractors wrong on this. The, , a certain National Medical Association, I won't say names, a certain national one that's all over America Medical Association wanted to. Prove chiropractor's wrong. So this guy named Windsor, W-I-N-D-S-O-R, he was tasked with going through cadavers and saying, okay, the chiropractor, I said, there's a misalignment here. These bones will be,, misaligned. They'll have degeneration, arthritis, and then their cause of death could be traced back to this part of where the nerves go. He accidentally proved chiropractors correctly. So all that research was promptly destroyed. But as chiropractors, we've heard about the Windsor autopsy studies. It's pretty cool., Like I said, city's gonna really cause problems in this area. The next thing is, , there's no direct blood going to our disc. Our discs need nutrients and our joints in our back need nutrients , and toxins pulled out. And normally that happens with a blood, right? But there's no blood supply here. So what happens is when you walk the muscles around there, they contract, they squeeze, they push the good stuff in, pull the bad stuff out, and they flush those joints. But if you're not doing that, if because you're sitting all day. Then these discs aren't getting the stuff they need in and they're not getting the stuff they need out. And in time they start to dehydrate. And if you add bad neck posture out of that, you are even overloading that area in your neck. And of course the bottom lumbars are gonna suffer because you're carrying more weight in the upper part of your back does because it's further down. And that's how gravity works. So you got these two spots in your neck that we see to get degenerative disc disease. That's the medical term for it. Chiropractors just think of it as a dehydrated disc., I think degenerative disc disease sounds a lot scarier, but in order to get that motion back, so if you sit all day, you're just gonna ruin that. It's gonna, it's gonna decay go away, and so you gotta get up and move around and walk and move around. In the old days, if you, my dad's time and my grandpa's time, if you had a bad spy and say you operated a jackhammer all day and you're up there pounding away all day and shaking, and you'd come in, now that's gonna create different spinal issues. Don't get me wrong, that's never fixed. No one's back. But they used to tell you, Hey, you know what? This physical job, this working, this,, cutting trees down, mowing yards, working outside, it's taking a toll on you. I think you should get a desk job and get off, get rid of the manual labor. And it turns out that was horrible advice. Right? It was the best advice we knew at the time. And it wasn't just chiropractors saying that, right?, It was everybody. So they would tell you to get a desk job and now you're just sitting there. Now those joints that are misaligned from doing the manual labor, they're not getting any motion in there anymore. Now they're rapidly dehydrating. Degener disc disease is going full speed now and the arthritis degeneration's happening , big time. So you gotta get up and move around. Sitting all day is gonna be really, really bad for you, so we gotta get you, not only that, but over time you got the pelvic tilt. because sitting too much, your pelvis starts to rotate and change. Your neck posture changes. And then you get up, you walk around and you've memorized these new postures, either forehead posture and a pelvic tilt. And that just keeps adding more stress. And then when you get the weekend, hey, we're gonna. Live for the weekend's coming, we're gonna go out and celebrate, do stuff on the weekend. Now you're back and your neck and your shoulders and your hips and everything hurts because of all the sitting you did all the time. So what's my rule?, It's, we can't just all quit our jobs to become forest rangers and start walking around the forest, although that would be cool. Now we have to still do our job. So I have a timer. And after 20 minutes, I stand up, I squeeze my shoulder blades together, I count to 10. I walk around the room for about 10, 15 seconds and I go back at it. because unfortunately, , if I get a records request or if I have to go do a a, a Zoom meeting with an attorney. Or a bore that I'm on, or just even sitting here right now recording this podcast. I'm sitting and I'm doing everything I just told you not to do. I am well aware of that. So I'll get up, I'll stretch, I'll walk around, and one, one of my tips if you have coworkers, I think you're getting up too much. Move around too much, get a big thing of water, put it at your desk, and every 20 minutes when you get up, they think that you're having to relieve yourself from drinking too much water. So just get up every 20 minutes and move around, and you gotta send a timer. If you don't set a timer, you're gonna let 20 minutes go by like that. We all know that. And you're gonna get up and start. People wait until they hurt to start stretching. At that point, you're already trying to play catch up. So set that timer first thing in the morning and every 20 minutes get up. squeeZ your shoulder blades together. Stretch your neck and shoulders out by doing that while you're standing up and then walk around the room a little bit. You can do both at the same time. It's, there's no harm in that, but if you just sit all day, you're gonna start to degenerate that and let that go away. We see more and more stress in the lower back and the pelvic tilt in the neck and shoulder area. Like I said, sitting to your spine's the same as sugar to your teeth. You gotta get up. You gotta move around. The number one areas we see. If you're having, if you're sitting a lot and you're getting that neck pain, you're getting that pain going down to your shoulder blades. You're getting hand tingling and numbness lower back if you feel like your lower back's always weak, always giving you problems. Not only that, but we talked about stability muscles and several podcasts. When I went to school we learned about cardiac muscles and your heart, smooth muscles in your blood vessels and skeletal muscles with the rest of them. The research today shows is actually a fourth type of muscle called stability muscles. Inside those cells are different than skeletal muscle. They look like skeletal muscle, but they're programmed different. They don't have the same organelles that a normal muscle cell has. Their job is to keep your eyes level at all time. The challenge though, you have to stand down one foot and try to do balance exercises. A lot of my athletes, I haven't performed or sport on wobble boards in order to make their stability of muscles stronger, especially my female athletes. If you sit all day, you'll lose these stability muscles. You start to get wild, but you start to get lose your balance and your spine suffers because of this. So you gotta get up and move around. And there's one population more than any other population that has this. Nobody else needs this more. That's somebody who's pregnant. When you're pregnant, you gotta get up and walk around. You gotta move around. Otherwise, that whole pregnancy becomes just a lot more discomfort instead of celebration. So if you know someone that's pregnant, you gotta get 'em up. Moving around pregnancy is so important, in chiropractic we study a lot about pregnant women. I even have advanced degree in it. So if you got questions about more about women who were pregnant, why they should go see a chiropractor, just come back next week. We'll talk about that. How's that sound? But until then, remember, if you have questions about chiropractic or chiropractic care, there's only one person that could possibly answer those questions, and that's a chiropractor. Your family doctor, your orthopedic doctor, your athletic trainer, your physical therapist, you're a mental therapist, your friend at the gym. They do not have any kind of chiropractic training to be able to answer these questions. Only a chiropractor does. Just if you have a question about your teeth, you never ask your optometrist. You'd only ask your dentist., If you like this podcast, tune in. Go back, listen to the other episodes I referenced, a lot of cool stuff to talk about. So I broke it down with several episodes. And if you know someone who's pregnant or if you know someone who's gonna become pregnant, come back next week. I got a cool topic about pregnancy. We'll see you then. Thank you.