A lot of us have to stand up at work all day long. If you own a business on the side but primarily work in retail, wait tables at a restaurant, take care of patients at the hospital as a nurse or you’re a police officer patrolling the streets… you’re going to have to spend long periods of time standing straight up on your feet. It’s not completely abnormal for standing workers to experience pains and aches in your feet, ankles, knees, legs and back. It’s important that you never ignore these symptoms, as your body is trying to tell you that something is off. However, there are things you can do to make standing up all day less painful on your body. So if you’re looking for some much needed relief from your standing job, then you can get started by including the following tips into your routine.
1. Get Supportive Footwear
If you are wearing yesterdecade’s worn out sneakers while you’re on the job, then odds are your footwear isn’t giving you at all that that much support anymore. Similarly, if you’re wearing a very low budget pair of flip flops, you’re probably also not getting the very best support you are. Same goes for other types of footwear such as high heels, which force you to transfer weight from your heel to your toe, completely altering your entire gait. The bottomline is that not all footwear is created equal.
If you’re standing for hours on end at work, then you’ll do well to invest some of your earnings in high quality, supportive footwear from a reputable brand. You can find plenty of examples on standingshoes.net. With footwear, you usually get what you pay for. Skimp on footwear and you’ll likely find yourself shopping for new shoes three months later. Whereas if you’d be willing to pony up a little more for quality, then your shoes are likely to last at least a year or two, depending on how intensively you are using them. A really great addition to a good pair of shoes, is a good pair of insoles. Brands such as Protalus provide unmatched comfort and support by improving the alignment of your ankles and lower body. Third party insoles will always provide better support than stock insoles.
2. Stand Up Straight
These days we are living in a culture that seems to promote poor posture. Too many people will let their heads lean over forward too much when they are standing straight up. This means the head extends from the shoulders. This is a bad idea, as it will create a poor posture for you. When the weight from your head is forward too much, it pulls your center of mass forward. This strains your muscles, making them word harder to keep you in an upright position. Keep this up long enough and it will wreak havoc on your body.
You should always make it a top priority to keep your ears straight above your shoulders and your shoulders straight above your hips. If you’re already doing this, keep up the good work. If you’re not already doing this, then you can accomplish it more easily by imagining that there’s a line running from between your feet up to the top of your head. If you can align yourself in such a way that this line is actually, well… you know… a straight line, then you are already on your way to improving your posture. This in turn will increase the amount of time you can stand up without pain.
3. Get Some Exercise
If you’ve got an image of yourself as a couch potato outside of your work, then it’s about time you changed something about that. If you’ve been living a sedentary lifestyle previously, then it’s understandable if you don’t feel like instantly hitting the gym with an annual subscription. But you can start out small, because every little bit helps. For instance, you could start your day by doing some stretches in the morning. And while you’re at it, you might as well do it in the evening, before bedtime, too! A little bit of walking about and sitting for a few minutes, will also help you prevent developing aches from standing all day.
It’s a great idea to work in some physical exercise here and there during your off hours as well. Buy a fitness mat and start doing some ground exercises. A simple search on YouTube for this term will yield more of such exercises than you’ll know what to do with. Learn a couple and repeat them. You’d be amazed what 5 minutes of exercise on a daily basis can do for you. Next to a fitness mat, you could also invest in a pair of dumbbells, which will also give you a great return on their minor, one time cost.
4. Build Muscle to Increase Strength
If your current physical condition permits it, then you could double down on the exercise idea and actually do some resistance training, or weight lifting, in order to get greater benefit than you would from little bits of exercise on the side. In case you are going to join a gym, there will be no shortage of machines that you can choose to exercise your legs. Should you also want to do this at home, then you can do squatting exercises. These can be done without any additional weight, in which case this exercise is referred to as a bodyweight exercise.
If you’re more serious, you could purchase a barbell and use it to perform deadlifts. With deadlifts, you lift the barbell up from the ground from a bent over position to a standing position. Deadlifts are considered to be a very strenuous exercise because it is a compound exercise. It’s called ‘compound’ because it exercises multiple muscle groups at the same time, namely all the muscle groups from your feet to your upper back. Just because it’s a very strenuous exercise, it does not mean you’ll soon grow to hate it and never perform it anymore. You simply have to have common sense about the amount of weight you’ll lift. It has to be enough that you’ll work up a sweat, but not so much that you’ll cripple yourself for a week to come.
Summary
What it all comes down to is that you need to take good care of the health of your body. The human body wasn’t meant to stand up all day long for much of a person’s lifetime. If you’re going to do it anyway, then you’ll have to set aside some time and resources to ensure that your body will be able to handle the stress from standing up as best as it can. Every little bit helps. The tips in this article are by no means exhaustive. So my advice to you is that you never stop looking for ways to optimize your ability to stand up straight for long hours at your job.
