Stay Fit & Healthy at Work
The Office Rat is here to help you cope with the vagaries of modern office work.
We office rats are afflicted by poor posture, high-stress work environments, fatigue, overwork, achy muscles, and a host of other conditions. As both an office rat and a massage therapist who works with desk workers all day, The Office Rat can help.
Office Fitness Tips
Most of the articles on this site are office fitness tips. The most recent tips are listed below. You can also browse the tips by afflictions and conditions and by coping strategies.
Stabilizing Your Shoulders for Better Desk Posture
Sorry for not posting much lately. I've been really busy in my massage practice and working on another publishing venture.
I've been thinking a lot lately about how to stabilize shoulders so that they can best serve you at your desk.
The rolled-forward posture that typically accompanies desk work leads to pain between the shoulder blades, sore necks, headaches, and other afflictions. Tucking your shoulders back and getting them to lie down on your torso is a first step to undoing this pattern and relieving your pain.
Forward-shoulder posture rotates the scapula forward and pulls the whole shoulder girdle up over the front of your torso. This stresses the muscles on your back, especially the muscles between and below the shoulder blades (primarily the rhomboids and the middle and lower parts of the trapezius).
- Larry's blog
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"The Case for Working With Your Hands"
One way to deal with the vagaries of office work is to not deal with the vagaries of office work.
In The Case for Working With Your Hands, Matthew Crawford contrasts his work as a motorcycle mechanic with inane desk work. More generally, he talks about the differences between "real" work (like construction trades) and the "knowledge work" that anchors so many of us to our desks.
After a long section on the challenges and rewards of being an independent trades worker, Crawford offers this look at one of the hallmark office rat roles, the middle manager:
Laptop Ergonomics
Laptop computers have now replaced desktop computers as many office worker's main computer.
This presents a challenging ergonomics problem. Since the laptop keyboard, pointing device, and screen are connected as a single unit it is impossible to have both a relaxed shoulder/arm/wrist position and a level neck and head posture.
If you raise the laptop to a comfortable position in front of your eyes, then the keyboard and pointing device will be too high and your wrists will suffer. If you lower the keyboard to a comfortable position, then you will strain your neck looking down at the monitor.