I die if I have to sit in my kitchen table chairs for more than about 10 minutes, I don’t know what I’m doing wrong in my life but everything always hurts all the time always. My moderately priced task chair and fancy mattress are the only things that save me from clanking around painfully like a cartoon skeleton that makes xylophone noises.
Conor Harris on YouTube shares a lot of helpful info and exercises, mainly targeted at the average desk worker. You might find him useful.
Incoming ramble: During quarantine, I had a granola-crunchy phase in which I was open to rediscovering the natural abilities of my body that my modern lifestyle allowed to wither. I switched to barefoot/minimal shoes, took cold showers, sat on the floor more, slept on the carpet. I didn’t continue all of these things, but I did gain an awareness of how we condition our bodies to not move or react to non-ideal conditions. My point is not to imply that switching shoes or using hard chairs will solve everyone’s problem. I just suppose that, in the same way society conditions our thinking and behavior, society also conditions our physical bodies indirectly through the conditioning of our movement and lifestyle. We almost exclusively sit in chairs, leading to poor ankle and hip mobility, and the loss of the ability to squat. The history of shoe development has led to a particular style of shoe with narrow toes, elevated heels, and stiff soles which deforms our feet and leads to flat arches, bunions, etc.
This sort of stuff has been something I’ve been getting into. I wear minimal shoes (on the rare day where I actually need to wear shoes. wtf is up with people who wear shoes in their house ew) but things like sleeping on the floor just do not work for me. Tried it for a few months, even invested into a proper floor futon, and the only thing I experienced was a profound and unending discomfort. I must just have worse bone-itis than Fry’s 80s guy friend. Or maybe all the “return to monke” stuff is bullshit, and we’re as big of dopes as the paleo diet freaks.
