Posture & Postural Strain Relief in Calgary

Patient Success Story: Improving Comfort Through Better Movement

When Working From Home Changed More Than Just the Commute

COVID was a difficult time for many people, and some of its effects are still showing up years later.

One of the biggest changes we continue to see is how much people move during the day.

Before the pandemic, many people naturally accumulated thousands of steps just by going to work, walking through an office, taking the stairs, going out for lunch, running errands, and moving between different parts of their day.

Then, almost overnight, work moved home.

For many people, the commute became walking from the bedroom to the kitchen table, or even sitting on the couch with a laptop.

What was supposed to last a few weeks became months, then years, and for many families it eventually became their normal way of working.

We recently saw a young mother of three who had been working from home since the pandemic. She came into our office with several different musculoskeletal complaints involving her neck, shoulders and back, but she couldn’t identify one specific injury or event that had caused them.

During her consultation, we started looking beyond simply where she hurt and spent time talking about how her daily life had changed.

That’s when an important piece of the puzzle appeared.

Before working from home, she was regularly getting more than 10,000 steps a day.

Now?

Some days she was only getting 1,000-2,000 steps.

Add in hours of sitting, working on a laptop in less-than-ideal positions, caring for three children, and significantly less regular exercise, and her body was being asked to function in a completely different environment than it had before.

There wasn’t necessarily one dramatic injury.

There had simply been a gradual loss of movement.

During her examination, we found areas of restricted spinal movement, muscular tension and postural stress that were consistent with what she had been describing.

We talked with her about something we discuss with many patients:

The human body was designed to move.

Chiropractic care couldn’t take the walks for her, exercise for her, or change her daily habits. That part still belonged to her.

What we could do was help address some of the joint restriction, stiffness and discomfort that were making movement feel more difficult in the first place.

Through a series of chiropractic adjustments, along with gradually increasing her daily activity, she began feeling more comfortable moving again.

Walking became easier.

Exercise felt less intimidating.

She started deliberately adding steps back into her day.

And as she became more active, she began noticing positive changes in how she felt overall.

That is an important part of chiropractic care that sometimes gets overlooked.

Our goal isn’t simply to tell someone to “move more” when movement hurts.

Sometimes our role is to help make movement feel easier so that person can begin doing the things their body needs.

For many people, working from home has been wonderful.

But it has also quietly removed an enormous amount of natural movement from everyday life.

A few weeks of sitting differently may not seem significant.

Several years of moving less can be.

Sometimes improving your health doesn’t begin with an extreme exercise program.

Sometimes it begins with helping your body move comfortably again and then simply taking the first few steps.