- How Sitting, Stress, and Clothes Destroy Our Bodies
- Why Steroids Are NOT Functional – Don’t Trade Your Health for Muscle
- How to Keep Leveling Up INFINITELY – Like Sung Jin-Woo
- The Ideal Physique is Easy for Most Guys When They Learn This – Toji Workout
- How to Train Your FOOT Muscles for Balance, Power, & Injury Prevention
- How to Do Sit Ups CORRECTLY for Ripped, Powerful Abs
- How to Train Your Nervous System Like a NINJA
- Pike Push Ups are Good and You Should Probably Do Them, Maybe
- Supercharge Your Mitochondria for Energy, Endurance, And Longevity
- Calisthenics will change you.
How Sitting, Stress, and Clothes Destroy Our Bodies
A lot of fitness advice is proactive.
“Do this to lose weight”
“Do this to build muscle”
“Take a protein shake”
This is all good. It’s great to take our health into our own hands and enact positive change.
But it’s also only a very small part of the equation. Because what’s arguably more important, is what we don’t do.
Fitness doesn’t just happen in the gym. It happens in all the smaller decisions we make during our every day lives.
Because, ultimately, we work out for about 30-90 minutes a few times a week, in most cases. That is a splash in the ocean compared with the absolutely huge amount of time we spend at work, commuting, and relaxing at home.
These activities are actively detrimental to our health and fitness.
Sitting F***s You Up
You’ve probably heard just how bad sitting can be. You’ve likely heard, for example, that it can directly shorten your lifespan. This is due to the sheer lack of movement and the fact that it therefore takes a toll on on your cardiovascular health – making things like heart attack more likely.
FIND STUDY.
But sitting does a lot more than that! It also means holding the same terrible posture for long durations. Your shoulders will likely be hunched and your neck will likely be protruding forward as you crane over your screen. This can lead to a hunched posture called “kyphosis.” It can also lead to tight pecs, poor overhead mobility, poor thoracic mobility, reduced blood flow to the brain, tight traps, and increased tension all-round. I mentioned in a recent video that I’ve been experiencing a tingling sensation in my right rhomboid. Well, turns out it’s not the rhomboid at all but rather my neck!
Maintaining bad posture can also cause issues with your legs. Because your hips are constantly flexed, this can lead to the hip flexors becoming both tight and weak. Meanwhile, the glutes become stretched, weak, and inactive. This makes glute engagement difficult during athletic activities. Robbing you of your strength and explosiveness.
Then there’s the pelvic alignment to think about. Sitting will often mean taking up either an anterior or posture pelvic tilt, either of which can lead to issues when lifting things off the ground.
And you’ll likely also be closing up your diaphragm and lungs as you compress your torso. This makes breathing more difficult, resulting in shallower breaths that activate the nervous system. This is bad news because it makes you literally more stressed – often compounded by environments filled with artificial light, stimulants (coffee), and deadlines.
You are meant to go into fight or flight to deal with physical challenges. When you’re in fight or flight just sitting there, there is a serious disconnect.
Some of you may already be typing in the comments. Let me finish.
I know there’s pushback against this notion. I know there are people saying there’s no such thing as bad posture, that there’s no need to stretch or worry about it.
I see this as coming from that same crowd that believe strength is the be-all-and-end-all of performance. People who desperately want to dismiss anything that isn’t a brute show of force.
Showing that you’re still able to stand up straight does not disprove the notion that you can suffer with bad posture. That’s because posture isn’t about being physically trapped in one position: it’s about habit. It’s about reinforcing the same neural patterns over and over, such that this becomes your default position.
Likewise, it means we get used to activating certain muscles in conjunction. Such that we develop tension throughout the body.
You will also find that not using certain positions results in loss of mobility. If you never deep squat, your central nervous system freezes up when you try to get into that position. As you will likely have heard: the reason you can’t get into middle splits is not because you have tissue physically tying your legs together; it’s because your nervous system isn’t used to that position and therefore freaks out when you try and get into it.
I’m speaking from experience. Both as a coach and from direct, lived experience. As many of you know, I used to be a freelance writer living in a small flat in London. My day started about 8am when my wife went to work and I would find a coffee shop to sit in with my Surface Pro. I’d then type and drink coffee and churn out anything from 10,000 to 30,000 words in a single go. I would do nothing but sit for HOURS.
And despite having been a very active individual all my life with an interest in all things performance: I developed a bad back, I lost the ability to deep squat, I lost the ability to get my hands overhead.
Thing is, we’re also sitting during our commutes very often. Then we sit when we get home. That’s because we’re lethargic, by the way. Lethargic from a lack of movement. And now in a more sympathetic state following a whole day of tense working.
Our environments are, meanwhile, arranged specifically to minimise movement. There are chairs everywhere. And all our objects are placed within easy reach – elevated to just the right height by tables, so that we never even need to stoop or reach.
In shopping markets elevators carry us upstairs and we drive even short distances. It is made difficult to walk from one place to another, in many cases, because city planning so often prioritises cars over human movement.
Many gym routines only exacerbate these issues. If you’re training your mirror muscles predominantly – your pecs and your shoulders and your abs – and ignoring muscles like the rotator cuff, the rhomboids, the spinal erectors, the glutes… Then you are creating further imbalance.
Likewise, most routines ignore all rotating movements and all side-to-side movements. Seeing as that’s all the exercise many of us get, it means we simply have no strength in these planes of motion.
Damn.
How We Rot Our Brains
During all this, we’re also basically frying our brains.
The worst thing we do from this perspective is to simply repeat the same actions over and over again. We exercise with the same few movements at the gym. At work, we get to a certain position and then our job becomes a simple matter of repeating a few actions.
When was the last time you learned something complete new? A new skill or a new movement?
This all results in a lowered production of brain plasticity promoting chemicals, such as BDNF. That, in turn, actually makes it harder to learn new things.
This can affect your ability to pick up new skills and it’s arguably at least partially responsible for the view that you “can’t teach an old dog new tricks.”
But it could even be somewhat responsible for our tendency to get very fixed and increasingly extreme in our views. Combine a lack of ability to change with the echo chambers and rage bait of the internet… and this simply isn’t good for our mental health.
A lack of movement is also bad for our mental health. We know that exercise produces endorphins. We know that being outside in nature helps calm the nervous system and set the circadian rhythms so that we sleep better.
So, what do you think it’s doing to you when you spend all day indoors, outputting?
The depressing part is that the harder we work trying to “escape the rat race” the more we end up destroying our own health further.
Clothing
Clothing just exacerbates this issue, by the way.
Because, most of the time, we are restricted and encumbered by our clothes. Answer me this: can you do a deep squat in the trousers you’re wearing right now? For most, the answer will be no.
How are you surprised your mobility is poor when you’re literally restricted by your movement? Again, movement isn’t something you should “do” a couple times a week!
I also have a big vendetta against carrying lots of stuff and wearing a big bulky coat. I work hard to be fast and agile. I love that I can climb up most stuff like Jackie Chan. There aren’t all that many people I can’t outrun.
But when I’m carrying my laptop I may as well have none of those skills. How am I going to outrun someone now? When I climb, I’m worried about breaking my stuff.
Shoes are the worst offenders in my experience. There’s a lot of talk about how they can weaken the muscles of your foot and that may well be the case. But on a much simpler level: regular shoes cut off sensation, preventing you from feeling the ground. This literally makes it harder to climb or run on uneven terrain instantly.
They also elevate your heels off the ground. This means your feet are constantly in plantar flexion, which means the calves are shortened. Is it any wonder you can’t squat without shoes, keeping your heels on the floor? A position that was essentially the default resting (and defecating) position, prior to the invention of chairs?
We are literally making ourselves weaker. Restricting our movement. Preventing proper breathing and circulation. Letting all of our muscles and connective tissues atrophy.
And, in all honesty, I’ve barely scratched the surface.
The Solution
So, what’s the solution?
There are easy lifestyle changes we can make, obviously.
First: we can change our clothing. Minimal footwear, for example, will let you move your foot more freely, challenge your ankle mobility, and feel the ground beneath you.
The same goes for the rest of your clothes: carry less and wear loose-fitting trousers that let you move whenever you want to.
We also need to stop thinking about health and fitness in terms of “something you do at the gym.” Those of us who feel lethargic, stiff, restricted… we try to fix this simply by spending time at the gym for a couple hours a day. And the workouts we follow are very often cookie-cutter workouts that are designed primarily to build muscle for help us lift more on a few specific exercises. Often compounding issues like tightness and imbalance.
This is almost like keeping a hamster in a cage and letting it run in a hamster wheel for a few minutes so that it burns some energy. It’s simply not enough.
First, then, we need to choose exercises that complement our lifestyles and address the issues we have.
Anyone who sits for a long time at the office should focus on strengthening their rhomboids, lower traps, rotator cuffs, lats… And they should focus on strengthening the glutes and the hip flexors, while also returning mobility to the hip flexors.
The same goes for our cognitive performance: if you spend all day focussing on something right in front of your eyes and feeling stressed… if you’ve picked up bad habits like shallow breathing… Something like meditation can be hugely beneficial. Practice resting your gaze and deep breathing to relax the body. Let your mind wander.
These are near “universal” weaknesses and it makes a lot more sense to be focussed on these, rather than simply building bigger pecs because it looks good.
Likewise, you need to find ways to address some of these issues, so that they aren’t causing problems in the first place.
For example: if you find yourself sitting for long durations, you should look at ways to alter your lifestyle such that this is no longer a problem. This might mean that you invest in a standing desk, or perhaps a floor cushion that you can sit on!
While I don’t agree with the knee-jerk reaction of saying we don’t need to think about posture at all… I do agree that “the best posture is your next posture.” If you move often, you’ll find you don’t develop these kinds of imbalances. To that end, simply having more than one place to work and moving between them can make a world of difference.
I have to worry about this a lot less as a parent who goes home for lunch and does the school run – I am rarely sitting still for long at all any more!
Of course, your ability to move around at work might be limited. But the less you can move at work, the more you need to make up for it the rest of the time. And you can find other ways to do this, too: whether that’s cycling or walking part or all of the way to work. Whether it’s doing stretches at your desk.
Getting out and walking outside, wherever possible, will also do wonders for your mental health and your energy levels. We need natural light, fresh air, and space to move.
Training outdoors is also massive. I’ve discussed at length the huge benefits this offers thanks to the more varied terrain and challenges. Again: think of your training, in many ways, as an antidote to a more sedentary daily life.
And, as I’ve discussed many times before, you’ll find you surprisingly feel more energetic at the end of the day.
I know this all applies very differently to physical labourers. I have slightly different advice for you guys and if that’s a post you’d like me to make in future, let me know! I do have a little experience, having done a couple of physical jobs in my time!
I think the most important thing, is to simply be aware of the damage that sitting and looking at screens all day does. Not only the extent of the damage, but also the nature of the damage. Then you can start taking logical steps to address those issues – whatever that might look like for you.
And remember: sometimes you need to work a little less. While the grind is very trendy right now, it somewhat misses the point. What matters isn’t impressing people online or making your boss happy: it’s enjoying your body and keeping it healthy.
Let me know what you think guys! And, as always, if you want to start training in a way that addresses the entire body: building strength, mobility, endurance, brain health and more… then try out my ebook and training program SuperFunctional Training 2.0. It’s currently on winter discount at the link below.
Either way, guys, thanks so much for watching… and bye for NOW!
