How to Set Up Your Desk to Relieve Pain (Neck, Lower Back, Shoulder, Trap)

If you have a desk job and you have neck pain, lower back pain, shoulder pain, or trap pain, I'm going to show you how to set up your desk to relieve all of the pain. See, most people set their desk incorrectly. We're going to show you today how to do it for a standing desk, for a sit-down desk, so that you don't have to constantly be worrying about your next flare-up. I'm Glenn Dawson with ResetU, and we have thousands of clients that come to us, tell us about how when they sit at the desk for hours, their neck flares up, their lower back flares up, and it puts them out of work for weeks. They can't focus. They make a lot of mistakes. So today I'm at Build Grow Scale headquarters at my good friend Matt's desk, and we're going to break it down and figure out what's wrong with him. So first, you want to have everything set up on your standing desk for your height. Now, Matt actually happens to be the same height as me, 6'3", and we both have the same angles. So the first thing you want is you want your keyboard to be at a perfect 90-degree angle so you don't have to move your arms down or up. If it's too high, you move the arms up, it'll start to put tension on your wrists. It's too low, you're going to start to put tension on the forearm. So you want it so it's perfectly rested, 90-degree angle. So that feels, feels nice. It feels right. The next thing you want is you want your monitor perfect height for your eyesight. So there should be a perfect direct line to where your monitor is at. Now, as you can tell, this monitor is not high enough. And I've talked to Matt numerous times about this. So even started putting books under here on Amazon or Office Depot, wherever you're going to go, they have things that will elevate your monitor. Right now we have to elevate the monitor. If you don't have those things and you're dealing with neck pain right now, I recommend books like these books from Vinny Fisher, awesome business books. And if you can get one large book, it's probably better than 10 of them for stability reasons. But that's not my monitor. So if it falls, it's not really my big deal. It's, it's more of Matt's deal. But now, as you can see, the monitor is in perfect eyesight. I don't need to look down or forward. And what basically happens, wherever your eyes are looking, your head's going to go with it. So as you start to look forward, that neck starts to just, just put tension on your traps, all the vertebrae up here. And before you know it, you look like a tortoise popping its head out of its shell. I have constant neck pain. Now for the lower back, is the standing desk better for you? A lot of people get a standing desk to get rid of lower back pain. I'm going to show you in a second how to put up a seated desk that doesn't actually have the same problem for your lower back. But the first thing comes with your hips, your pelvis. Is the number one cause of lower back pain. So how I want you to stand is with your feet sort of wide, not feet together, not legs crossed. Legs crossed basically twists your pelvis out of alignment, causes more of an issue, but kind of with a wide stance on a padded floor. And then push your knees outward and your butt outward and lightly flex your stomach like you're about to get punched. Now, this may seem uncomfortable at first, but this creates stability through your hips. And your stomach so your lower back muscles don't have to fire. And your lower erectors, the ones that are firing when you're doing this, they're super small. They're smaller than your bicep. And if you've ever done bicep curls, it's probably one of your weaker lifts. These muscles back here, they're not supposed to hold a lot of weight. So make sure that your glutes are doing the work, your legs are doing the work, lower back's not. Now, if you're in lower back pain right now and your pelvis is out, it really doesn't matter if you have a sit-down desk or a stand-up desk. You have to put your pelvis back into alignment, because even if I'm standing and I have my hips out of alignment, it's not going to make it any better, right? You have to reset your pelvis. We'll have options for that later. Right now, let's talk about the seated desk. Now, a lot of the same rules apply to the seated desk as it was with the standing desk to get rid of pain and alleviate symptoms. You want your desk to be set up so that your monitor is again at eye line height and you want your arms to be perfect 90-degree angles. So the monitor is perfect again, arms 90-degree angles, maybe even a little higher. So there's no break in the, in the wrist, there's no tilting. And the other thing too, if you're— if your desk is too high, you'll start to shrug your shoulders up and then tighten those neck muscles again. Now, what do you do in your chair? This is very, very, very important for pelvic alignment. If you're in your chair right now watching this video, here's a quick test. Put your knees in front of you like this, really close, like a good girl, and then lean forward. And what you'll notice is it's very easy to round your spine here. Easy. And it's easy for you to sit and round your spine, round your shoulders, round your chest, and create a lot of tension on your lower spine and your lower back. This is because none of your glutes are firing and your pelvis is starting to tilt back and create more tension on your lower spine. And a lot of muscles are getting turned off. So in a chair, your glutes, your hamstrings, your back muscles, everything's basically just turned off. And the dominant muscles that are getting worked, like your chest and your shoulders and your hip flexors that tighten you up, are just getting more tight and more strong. So what you want to do is you're going to want to spread your legs out around the chair like a bad girl like this. Now perform the same test. Try to lean forward and you'll notice there's a little bit of resistance in your lower back. It doesn't want to round and it's more difficult. And you can really only round the upper part of your spine. Well, this is because now our pelvis is neutral and our spine is tilted straight perpendicular the way it's supposed to. The other thing that's happening is we're activating our glute. Outside to pull our knees away from center. That's giving us a little bit of pelvic stability. Now, you can't activate all of your glutes. You're just activating your glute meads to pull the knees out. But it's still better than nothing. You're still going to want to get out of your chair every 90 minutes to 2 hours. But this is still going to give you some stability through the hips. Then just make sure your arms are at 90-degree angles. Eyeline is perfect and you're good to go. Now, if you have a laptop like a lot of people do working from laptops, you'll notice there's no possible way for you to look straight up and down with a laptop. And you're going to be typing on a laptop keyboard and sooner or later tilt forward. And even though your lower back may not hurt, your upper traps, your neck, everything, especially if you're lifting weights, is going to flare up. So You can get a laptop elevator just like this. Super simple. And elevate your laptop to the height of your eyeline. Then get a separate keyboard like so, and you're back in business. Now, if you're working at a coffee shop and you want to work on your laptop, You got to pick. Do you want to be that person that brings their laptop elevator with no neck pain, or do you want to be the nerd that has neck pain because they didn't want to bring this laptop elevator? It's up to you. What kind of nerd do you want to be? The nerd without neck pain or the nerd with neck pain? I don't know. But guys, if this brought you value, make sure you share it. There's a ton of people out there that are working from home or at an office now. They're going to have back pain, they're going to have neck pain, they're going to have shoulder pain. Make sure you share with them. And then if you feel like your hips are out of alignment like we talked about before, I want you to take the first step in our reset protocol. We can help you to reset your body from the inside out. Click the link and go ahead and get started on your first step of your reset now.