Preventing desk work pain 101:

I'd like to talk today about one of the most common things that brings people to my clinic: shoulder pain. These patients are office workers throughout the week, and are active on the weekends. We commonly refer to these folks as "weekend warriors".

Their pain typically lives on the front or the outside of their upper arm, has come on slowly over a few months, and is felt with arm movements such as reaching overhead or putting on a jacket. The pain is typically worse after activity, especially when that activity involves throwing or rotating--if you're a golfer or a softball player I'm looking at you!

For the majority of these cases, the pain is not preceded by a specific injury event. This type of discomfort is referred to as "functional impingement" but that makes it sound a bit scarier than it needs to. A functional impingement is when the shoulder blade and upper arm movements are not well synchronized due to tightness or weakness surrounding the shoulder. This results in a pinching or irritation of certain structures that live in the space under your shoulder blade/collarbone. I typically describe this to patients as a "co-operation issue". Certain muscles aren't working well together, affecting how smoothly your shoulder moves.

The factors that lead to an impingement are present long before the shoulder becomes painful, and the best way to deal with this type of injury is to address it before it becomes a problem. If you've already got shoulder pain, have no fear--the prevention and the rehabilitation are very similar processes.

Here are a few things to work on if a good chunk of your day is spent on one device or another:

1) If you're working from home on a laptop, create multiple work areas and cycle through them regularly. Spending hours working in the same position creates tension in the same set of muscles rather than sharing the load throughout the body. You can have a standing station if you'd like, that is entirely up to you! Variety in position is the key to success.

2) Move! One colleague of mine always said that the body is like cement waiting to dry. Much like cement, the more you keep moving, the less stiff you will feel. The typical recommendation is to do a few quick movements every twenty minutes. That could be as simple as rolling your shoulders a few times.

3) Look away from your screen every twenty minutes. This is called the 20-20-20 rule. Every twenty minutes, look at something twenty feet away for twenty seconds. This will greatly reduce your eye strain. No blue light filters needed!

4) Create reminders to correct your posture. Set alarms on your phone, put sticky notes around your desk, write a note on your water bottle. You don't have to stay in one "perfect" posture for your entire work day but reminding yourself to correct your posture will take your neck, shoulders, and upper back through ranges of motion that would otherwise be neglected while slumping. The easiest posture correction: picture somebody pulling you straight up by a string on the top of your head.

By addressing environmental and habitual factors we can create much longer term solutions and prevention for this type of condition. It doesn't matter how many exercises you do at the end of the day if you aren't looking at how you spend 40+ hours of your week. Start incorporating these quick tips into your work day and let me know how they feel. And stay tuned, next week I'll go over some corrective exercises for a functional impingement!

#education