published 12/18/06

Microbreaking

Prevent low back pain and neck cricks with lots of little breaks

by Paul Ingraham, Vancouver, Canada MORE

Credentials and qualifications

I am a writer and retired Registered Massage Therapist (unusually well-trained for a massage therapist, a 3000-hour program). I’m almost done with a Bachelor of Health Sciences degree. I am a peer reviewer for The Natural Standard, and a copyeditor for Science-Based Medicine. My most important qualification is more than a decade of workaholic post-graduate study, clinical experience, and constant conversations with readers from around the world, including many experts who have provided countless suggestions and criticisms.

For more information, see: Who Am I to Say? More information about my qualifications, credentials and professional experiences for my readers and customers.

Are you suffering from low back pain? You may want to start with this article instead: Save Yourself from Low Back Pain! It will lead you back here in time.

This article describes and prescribes “microbreaking” — a survival strategy for chair-bound office workers. The value of microbreaking is mainly based on the idea that tissue stagnancy is A Very Bad Thing, and that the right amount of stimulation is essential for optimum tissue health. The scientific evidence for this is covered in several other articles (see Further Reading list below), while this article pretty much just sticks to the “how to” of microbreaking.

Microbreaks are regular, small, meaningful breaks from being stuck in one position at work. It is a survival skill for every chair-bound office worker, student, computer user, or anyone at all whose work (or play) generally requires long hours of being sedentary.

Microbreaking is a survival skill for every chair-bound office worker, student, computer user.

Microbreaking is a concept in dynamic ergonomics that has begun to eclipse more familiar, conventional ergonomic priorities. The idea is simple: no chair or efficiently arranged computer workstation, no matter how comfortable, can protect you from the danger of hours of sitting every day. The only truly ergonomic workstation “arrangement” is to break free of it regularly. You must have a “come here/go away” relationship with your workstation.

But I get up at work all the time

Sure you do! Most people do. At the very least, you probably get up to get water, and to go to the bathroom. I even know people who deliberately drink extra water to force themselves to take breaks. (Often, this is also motivated by an unjustified fear of dehydration. See Water Fever and the Fear of Chronic Dehydration.)

I know people who deliberately drink extra water to force themselves to take breaks.

You get up to go the photocopier or fax machine, to run something by your boss, to get the big hole punch, and so on. Some of you might even get up to stretch — not realizing that stretching is pretty over-rated as a form of therapeutic exercise (see Quite a Stretch).

Congratulations. You are halfway there! It’s good that you’re getting up — any getting up is good, and I would never want to discourage it. But …

More, more, more!

The frequency of your breaks is probably not quite enough. Most office workers, in my experience — especially engineers, programmers and other assorted geeks (and I’m one of you) — simply do not get up as often as they need to. Even drinking water full tilt and going to the bathroom every hour, on the hour, is just not enough.

For every twenty minutes of stagnation, you should have at least one minute of stimulation: the “20:1” rule.

More importantly, just taking “a break” from the chair simply isn’t enough …

I hate to “break” this to you (yuk yuk)

Earlier in this document I wrote that microbreaks are “meaningful” breaks. What did I mean?

Walking to the water cooler and back simply does not constitute meaningful stimulation for back muscles that are screaming with stiffness. I know it’s a shock to learn this, but you were going to find out eventually.

Walking to the water cooler and back simply does not constitute meaningful stimulation for back muscles.

It is necessary to actually do something therapeutic with microbreaks. “Something therapeutic” means “something stimulating,” or “something the most perfectly opposite of whatever your are normally doing at work that is practical to do for one minute.”

And that would be: mobilizations.

Mobilizations: massaging with movement

Mobilizations are repeated, rhythmic movements. It’s kind of like stretching, but with ants in your pants. More technically (a lot more technically), mobilizations repeatedly and substantially contract and elongate all or most of the musculature around a joint or in a region.

Less technically again, it’s basically therapeutic wriggling. The subject of mobilizations is thoroughly covered in Mobilizing!.

Mobilizing is like stretching, but with ants in your pants.

Everybody mobilizes instinctively, sort of. Everyone squirms, wrenches, twists, trying to wiggle free from stiffness, active trigger points, muscle knots. Brief stretches, repeated once or twice, accompanied by sighs and groans, grimaces and joint pops, are extremely common reflexive behaviours seen in the caged human animal. These movements usually “take the edge off,” and then subside.

Do more than take the edge off. That’s all mobilizing is: nothing more than following that instinct, more rationally, more systematically, above all more repetitively. Does rolling your head around once or twice feel good? Necessary? Then do it eighteen times!

Squirming	Mobilizations
Squirming versus mobilizations
instinctive	rational
desperate	optimistic
takes the edge off	therapeutic
1–3 repetitions	10–50 repetitions

About stretching again

Taking a break to stretch is almost comically irrelevant to the problem. The problem is stagnation, stillness. Ergo, static stretching is a bit off the mark.

(Some people have a rather dynamic stretching style, much like mobilizing. Ironically, they tend to kind of guilty, ironically, for not “holding” their stretches longer. Also, although a lot better that static stretching, dynamic stretching still tends not to be systematic and repetitive enough to constitute a real antidote for all that stagnation in the chair.)

Again I’ll emphasize that anything is better than nothing, but conventional “hold it for sixty seconds” stretching is probably not an ideal solution for a sedentariness problem. It always gives me a bit of a chuckle, actually.

Uh oh … another “should”

By far the most difficult thing about microbreaking, and its greatest weakness as a therapeutic strategy, is that it firmly fits into that irritating category of “something else I’m supposed to remember to do.”

I swear I do this to people as little as possible. I (completely) understand what a blur of big and little obligations and “shoulds” that most people are dealing with in their lives — I have my own extensive collection.

But in this case it’s necessary.

I understand what a blur of big and little obligations and “shoulds” that most people are dealing with in their lives.

As explained in other articles more thoroughly (see Back Pain and Other Hazards of Sitting In Chairs (Way) Too Much), sitting a lot is flat out dangerous. It is probably significantly responsible for the epidemic (not an exaggeration) of low back pain in industrialized nations. A career in a chair, like long distance running, is an exercise in seeing how much your body can put up with: not everybody can do it, and nobody can do it forever. Not without consequences.

Sitting in a chair all day is like long distance running: not everybody can do it, and nobody can do it forever.

Microbreaking is something you simply cannot afford not to learn, not if you expect to survive years of sitting. Every chair warrior needs several survival strategies, but this is the most important, the most inescapable of them.

And yet … it’s kind of tricky.

Teaching old dogs new tricks

Almost everyone has trouble remembering to get up every twenty minutes. I’ve had engineers tell me flat out, “Forget it. I’m not doing it. I can’t do it. If it breaks me, fine, I’ll stop when I break.” That is their prerogative, of course, and yours — I look forward to many years of regular business from such customers!

Almost everyone has trouble remembering to get up every twenty minutes.

But most people, I hope, will choose not to run themselves into the ground, and accept that sitting in a chair comes with a price: a certain inevitable chronicity of stiffness and pain, and, to keep it in check, a microbreaking habit as regular as brushing your teeth. The question is not if but simply how. Here are some of the best strategies I’ve seen my clients use for building and sustaining a microbreaking habit:

Do your best to keep it from being a “should” by simply attaching the habit to your own natural instinct to mobilize. Simply “convert” your normal twists, turns and squirms into more positive and systematic mobilizations.
Use timing software, which will interrupt your work at regular intervals. There are several such applications available for Windows, and one particularly useful one for Mac called TimeOut. Many people find that such automated interruptions quickly become just another bit of background noise in their life, all too easily ignored, but others find them effective at least in phases.

Convert your normal twists, turns and squirms into more positive and systematic mobilizations.

A simple egg timer can have quite a different psychological “feel” than microbreaking software. Several of my clients insist that, even if they forget or neglect to set the timer some of the time, it is much more real and interruption to them.
The hydration strategy is not bad, but remember that it doesn’t usually generate quite enough breaks — even full-steam-ahead water drinking usually doesn’t make most people need to pee more than about once an hour.
The “revolving chairs” system marries microbreaking to another self-preservation strategy: rotating between seating arrangements. Using a chair/stool combination with a wobble cushion gives you effectively four different ways of sitting (chair with/without cushion and stool with/without cushion). Some people find it easier to remember to change how they are sitting than to microbreak, so coupling the two together can be quite effective.
For a lot of hard workers, changing mental focus regularly is unacceptable, and so they have found that they can microbreak without a work stoppage. I advise these people to microbreak simply standing up and mobilizing the back and hips while still typing and mousing. While I question their sanity and priorities, I actually understand all too well — consider how many hours I’ve invested in this website! And there isn’t really any reason to stop working, as long you actually do move your back and hips.

There are countless more solutions, one for every individual. Good luck … and happy microbreaking!