If You Must Sit, Sit ‘Like a Man’
Credit to Author: Hannah Smothers| Date: Thu, 21 Nov 2019 18:43:30 +0000
Are you sitting down right now? I sure am, and, apparently, I am doing it wrong. Wrong way to sit?, you might be thinking. But how can there be a wrong way to sit?! Well, let me tell you! As reported by the Washington Post, Barbara Bergin, an orthopedic surgeon in Austin, Texas, says the proper way to perch upon one’s hiney is… like a man!! Bergin even has a tidy acronym for this: S.L.A.M., or Sit Like A Man.
Bergin developed this philosophy after noticing that her achy hip joints stopped bugging her on the days she drove her “big truck,” instead of the small, compact car she usually drives to work. The bucket seats in her little car are narrow and forced her to sit with her knees close together—like a lady, some might say—and sitting like that was causing the hip pain, she said. “Developmentally, women have a wider pelvis than men,” Bergin explained to the Washington Post. This means women’s femurs rotate internally from the hip joint, and the knees end up lining up inside the hips—which, over time, can cause painful musculoskeletal and misalignment problems.
The solution? Sit in the traditional “man” posture, with the knees slightly spread open. I see where Bergin is coming from with S.L.A.M., and while I do see lots of men out in the wild, sitting with their legs all cattywampus, many women sit like this, too. Seems unfair to gender it as “male” when “nearly anyone with a butt and two legs” can do it. Also, as Bergin brings up herself, many associate men-sitting with man spreading, which is not at all right: “A lot of my patients will say: ‘Oh, you want me to manspread,’” Bergin told the Washington Post. “That’s too far the other way.” The best way to sit, she explained, is with the legs at about 11 and 1 on a clock, the outer thighs relaxed, and with no knee-knocking. This is pretty easy to visualize, but I drew some diagrams, just in case:
I’ve only been practicing the man sit for about two hours and I haven’t noticed any differences yet; though I imagine I look really powerful, sitting like this, knees splayed with abandon. I’m going to keep doing it to see what happens. I trust Bergin because she is a doctor, she’s from Texas, and S.LA.M. is a cool acronym.
But it also seems to me that even if you sit the right way (the man way), it would still be preferable, if you are physically able, to just… sit less. People have mostly stopped saying, “Sitting is the new smoking,” maybe because that was très dramatic, but it’s still generally agreed upon that we sit too much. Aside from the health problems Bergin describes (joint pain), researchers correlate too much sitting with more severe issues, like increased blood pressure, abnormal cholesterol levels, and an increased risk of cardiovascular disease and cancer. Bergin isn’t suggesting this to be the case, but none of those things can be avoided by sitting with your knees spread, groin open to the elements. A lifetime of sitting, no matter the stance, is bad, and is why even the prototype office worker, Emma, looks like an animorph; her robot body wrecked by imaginary years of sitting hunched over a desk. The most correct way to sit might actually just be… to stand.
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This article originally appeared on VICE US.