· 5 min read
A large share of the people who walk into this building work at a desk on the Arsenal or for one of the contractors around it. The complaint arrives in a fairly standard form: tight hips, an achy lower back by Thursday, and a sense that something is being permanently damaged by the chair.
The last part is worth pushing back on. Sitting is not injuring your spine, and there is no single correct posture you are failing to hold. What sitting does is keep tissue in one position for hours, and tissue held in one position gets stiff and stops tolerating the ends of its range.
What actually changes
Hip flexors shorten their comfortable range. Glutes get very little to do, so they contribute less when you finally ask them to. And the lower back ends up doing work the hip should have done, which is where the Thursday ache comes from.
None of that is permanent, and none of it needs an expensive intervention. It needs the range used regularly and the glutes given something to do.
The short list
Get up every 45 minutes, even briefly. Walk. Hinge properly a few times a week, loaded, which is the single most direct answer to glutes that have gone quiet. Spend some time each week at the end of your hip range rather than the middle of it.
In practice that is one or two sessions of hinge and carry work and one the conditioning class that gets you off the chair and breathing. If you would rather someone build that around your actual week, one-to-one sessions are the fastest way in, particularly if there is already a niggle.
Where the two halves of the building meet
The reason we ended up with a gym and a chiropractic practice at one address is this exact problem. Adjusting someone whose hips then go straight back into a chair for eight hours is a temporary result. Giving them strength work with no attention to what is actually restricted is the same problem from the other end.
You can read more about the clinical side at Functional Chiropractic, and there is more from both of us on the Fitness 300 blog. If the sticking point shows up in your squat specifically, squat depth and hip mobility goes deeper, and if the back is already complaining, back pain on the gym floor is the one to read first. Before a session, what a good warm-up does matters more for desk workers than for anyone else.