You're listening to Life Kit from NPR.

Hey everybody, it's Mariel.

Have you ever seen that meme of a shrimp in a desk chair?

Normally, I try not to explain memes or jokes, but this one's pretty straightforward.

You know how shrimpies get curled up into sort of a hook shape?

Imagine that,

but sitting in a desk chair trying to fill out an Excel spreadsheet. A lot of us sit like this or in equally tortured positions. And that's bad, right? I always laugh as a physical therapist

because people send it to me all the time. But the reality is, it's not so much

the posture in itself, but the time and the amount of movement that we actually get throughout the

day to interrupt those stagnant positions. That's Lita Malik. She's a physical therapist, an author of the

book, Science of Stretch. And she says,

if you hold your body in a shrimp-like shape for a short amount of time, probably not a huge deal.

If you do it all day, every day, that's when you start hurting. Katie Bowman is a biomechanist,

which means she studies the effects that physical forces have on the body.

She says you may have felt this effect after a long time in transit when everything in your body feels stiff.

Usually on a plane or a car, you don't get to have any movement breaks whatsoever.

You're really, really stuck in a position.

So what do you do in those moments?

You shake out your muscles, stretch, and move your body into other positions.

Katie, who wrote a book called Rethink Your Position, says doing that throughout your life is what leads to good posture. We've got so many parts. And I don't think we're really fluent in all the options

that we have for positions, despite the number of joints and hinges and levers

that really allow us to assume many different shapes. We're kind of stuck in the same set of

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