You're listening to LifeKit from NPR.
Hey everybody, it's Marielle.
Have you ever seen that meme of a shrimp in a desk chair?
Normally I try not to explain memes or jokes, but this one's pretty straightforward.
You know how shrimpies get curled up into sort of a hook shape?
Imagine that, but sitting in a desk chair, trying to fill out an Excel spreadsheet.
A lot of us sit like this, or in equally tortured positions.
And that's bad, right?
I always laugh as a physical therapist because people send it to me all the time.
But the reality is, it's not so much the posture in itself,
but the time and the amount of movement that we actually get throughout the day to interrupt those stagnant positions.
That's Lita Malik.
She's a physical therapist and author of the book, Science of Stretch.
And she says, if you hold your body in a shrimp-like shape for a short amount of time,
Probably not a huge deal.
If you do it all day, every day, that's when you start hurting.
Katie Bowman is a biomechanist,
which means she studies the effects that physical forces have on the body.
She says,
you may have felt this effect after a long time in transit when everything in your body feels stiff.