Time Warner Cable News’ Kristen Shaughnessy asked a chiropractor for some tips on how to protect your posture. She filed the following report.
A chiropractor NY1 spoke with describes sitting as the new smoking. He says too many people are spending too many hours hunched over a desk and it is not good for their health.
"You lose your range of motion; you lose your flexibility, neck pain, back pain, shoulder pain. Any type of ailment you can think of it correlated to the excessive amounts of sitting,” says Dr. Todd Sinett
He wrote the book "3 Weeks to a Better Back." He says your posture, your diet and your stress level can all play a role in back pain. He says the good news is excessive sitting is an easy problem to fix.
"Stand up every hour and really loosen up,” he suggests. “There's a product I created that is designed to put extension into your body, because again the more we sit, the further hunched we are. It's really unattractive and it doesn't function well."
If you are texting while you are sitting, that is even worse. Dr. Sinett says every degree your head is down adds ten pounds of pressure to your neck.
"So if you're down texting like this or looking at your iPod or something like that, you're actually adding 60 pounds of pressure to your neck - so it's really very important that we get you back standing up tall and straight," Sinett says.
There are simple exercises that can make a big difference.
"Just think about how long in your day that you are literally hunched forward so we really want to continually chip away at it so we can take you from a posture of this and really bring you back," Sinett says.
You know when you were younger and people would tell you to stand or sit up straight. Well, Dr. Sinett says there is really something to that.