Our addiction to chairs is ruining out butts. Desk jobs make this almost an epidemic. You spend all day sitting at work, sit in your car, and then sit in front of the TV in the evening. All of this sitting in chairs is turning off our butt muscles.

Why is this a problem? Because when you butt muscles get turned off (inactive glutes) it causes an imbalance around your hips. This can lead to anterior pelvic tilt, low back pain, and posture problems.

But why is sitting a problem? Haven’t humans been sitting forever? Well yes and no… The manner in which we sit has evolved a lot faster then our butts have. If you look around the world, you will see a lot of variations in how we sit, and most of them don’t involve chairs. The way humans sat typically involved your body and the ground, you would squat, kneel, sit cross-legged, etc. These methods don’t have the same problems as constant chair sitting.

Constant chair sitting leads to short tight hip flexors, and lazy glutes. This is what pulls your hips forward into that anterior tilt position, causing funny angles in your low back, leading to posture problems, inflexibility and low back issues.

How can you avoid this you ask? Well there are some stretches you can do while at work to prevent this problem. You already know that you’re supposed to take a quick computer screen visual break every 20-30 minutes, so while doing so, stand up and do this stretch.

Standing Hip Flexor Stretch/Glute Activation. Stand on one leg and lift your other foot up behind you to your butt and hold it with your hand at the ankle. If you lift your left foot, use your left hand, right with right. If your balance is lacking a bit, hold onto your desk with your free hand. Relax the muscles that run down the front of your hip and once that releases, squeeze your glutes and hold for 5 seconds. This will intensify the stretch and activate your butt. After the 5 seconds, relax, and repeat a few times. Then switch legs. You want to stand tall, tighten up your abs a bit, and keep your spine neutral, don’t arch your back.

Standing Hip Flexor Stretch. Image: TheSanDiegoBootCam

If you feel that you already have a bit of this problem, then there are a few more things you can at home to get your back working again. Lay on your back, bend your knees 90 degrees with your feet flat on the floor. You will now perform a supine bridge by only squeezing your glutes. You just squeeze your glutes and your hips will rise up off the ground into a bridge. Don’t use your back, or your hamstrings for this, if your legs cramp up you aren’t doing it right. Quality is better then quantity, so even if you squeeze your glutes and you don’t get a bridge, that’s ok, we want glute activation here, not a bridge using the wrong muscles.

There are many more exercises you can do to work on this problem but these will get you started. I want you to do that standing stretch while at work, doing 3x “5 second squeezes” per leg every 30 minutes (or 3 each leg x2 every hour). And do your bridges in the evening, again holding for 5 seconds, relax and repeat.

Chris Walls is a Personal Trainer at the Crossfit Kelowna training centre.  For more information on Crossfit, please visit http://www.crossfitkelowna.com