Clinical physiotherapy is not only relevant when you can’t cope with the pain anymore, but also when you start noticing that work is taking a toll on your body day after day.
Hours in front of the computer, calls, meetings, mouse, keyboard, or repetitive tasks in a warehouse or at the counter… and, by the end of the day, your neck is stiff, your back feels heavy, your shoulders are up by your ears and your wrists are begging for a break.
If you recognise yourself in this picture, you’re not alone. We see more and more people coming into the clinic saying things like: “I sit all day, I try to sit up straight, I’ve changed my chair… but the pain always comes back.”
The good news is that it doesn’t all depend on having “perfect posture”, and there are things you can start doing right now to relieve and prevent discomfort.
The other good news is that clinical physiotherapy can help you understand what’s really going on and build a realistic plan that fits your job.
In this guide we’ll talk about why it’s not just “bad posture”, how your neck, back, shoulders and wrists are linked to the way you work, and which reasonable changes you can make without changing job or turning your office into a gym.
It’s not just “bad posture”: what’s really happening in your body
For years, the message “sit up straight” has been repeated as if everything were as simple as sitting properly in your chair and that’s it.
However, when we see patients in clinical physiotherapy, we rarely find a single culprit. Rather than one “bad posture”, what we see is a combination of factors that pile up over time.
On one hand, there’s the load of hours: spending 7, 8 or 9 hours a day in very similar positions, with minimal variation, makes certain areas of the body work far more than they can comfortably handle.
Your cervical spine is constantly holding your head slightly forward towards the screen, your shoulders live slightly elevated, your upper back stays rounded forward and your lower back spends longer sitting than it would like.
On the other hand, there’s stress. When you’re dealing with deadlines, meetings, a full inbox and endless notifications, your nervous system is far from relaxed.
That often shows up as increased, persistent muscle tension, especially in the neck, upper shoulders and muscles between the shoulder blades. And that tension, day after day, is the perfect setting for pain to appear.
On top of that comes the lack of breaks and movement. Even if you have the best chair on the market, if you spend hours without getting up, your body will complain. Not because you’re weak, but because humans are simply not designed to stay still for so long.
When you combine load, stress and little variation in posture, what appears is not just “bad posture”, but a set of habits and contexts that exceed your body’s capacity to adapt.
And this is where clinical physiotherapy can help you put a clear name to what’s happening and find realistic ways to reduce that overload.
Neck, back, shoulders and wrists: how they’re linked to the way you work
Many patients arrive saying “my back is destroyed”, but when we start talking, a much more detailed map appears.
It often starts with a stiff neck at the end of the day, that feeling that it’s hard to turn your head, that your upper shoulders are always tight. Sometimes it comes with tension headaches, like a band squeezing around your head, or pain at the base of the skull.
The area between the shoulder blades is another big victim. If you work at a computer, it’s easy to spend hours with your shoulders slightly rounded forward, the upper back hunched and your eyes fixed on the screen.
Those muscles end up working non-stop, holding that posture over and over, and eventually they “burn out”.
The lower back also often complains, especially when you alternate long periods of sitting with bursts of effort, like lifting boxes, moving chairs, bending down quickly or carrying kids when you get home.
A lumbar area that spends many hours “switched off” in the chair will react worse when it suddenly has to handle effort again.
And then there are your wrists, hands and forearms. Continuous use of the mouse and keyboard, often with the mouse too far away or the wrist resting in a forced position, can lead to tendon overload or nerve irritation in the carpal tunnel or other passageways. The result: pain, tingling, and strange sensations in some fingers.
None of this means your body is broken. It means that the way you work, the time you spend in certain positions and the way your workstation is set up may be putting more strain on your tissues than they can comfortably tolerate.
From a clinical physiotherapy perspective we don’t just treat the pain, we sit down with you to analyse what can be changed so you stop living in “firefighting mode” all the time.
Basic ergonomic tweaks that really make a difference
You don’t need to throw your desk away to improve things. Very often, in clinical physiotherapy we work with what you already have, making small adjustments that make a big difference to how you feel at the end of the day.
Screen, keyboard and mouse: what height should everything be?
Ideally, the top edge of your screen should be roughly at eye level when you’re sitting in a relaxed position, without shrugging your shoulders or puffing your chest out.
If the screen is too low, your head will tend to move forward and your neck into flexion; if it’s too high, you’ll end up lifting your chin and overloading the back of your neck.
The keyboard should be close enough that you don’t have to reach your arms far forwards. The same goes for the mouse: if you place it too far away, your shoulder will work in a semi-elevated position all the time.
The goal is that, when you’re typing or using the mouse, your elbows stay close to your body and roughly at desk height, without having to lift your shoulders.
Chair, lumbar support and pelvic position
You don’t need a spaceship chair, but you do want to sit so that your feet are supported on the floor, or on a footrest if you’re shorter, and your knees are roughly at hip height or just below.
If your knees are much higher than your hips, your pelvis rolls backwards and your lower back loses its natural curve.
A reasonable lumbar support (the backrest itself or a simple cushion) helps prevent that “collapsed” posture. But even with good support, it’s important to have permission to change position.
No posture, no matter how correct, is good if you hold it for five hours in a row.
Elbows, shoulders and hands: the chain that ends up hurting
Imagine looking at your posture from the side. Ideally, your elbows would be bent to about 90 degrees, close to your body, and your shoulders would be neither hunched up towards your ears nor excessively rounded forwards.
Your wrists should be as neutral as possible, not strongly extended or flexed while you type or use the mouse.
These seem like tiny details, but when we review them in clinical physiotherapy, with the patient sitting in their “real” working posture, we usually find clear opportunities for change without any major investments.
Active breaks and micro-exercises: moving without turning the office into a gym
There’s a phrase we repeat a lot: there is no perfect posture if you don’t move. You can sit “well”, but if you stay like that for hours, your body will still end up protesting. That’s why active breaks are so important.
It’s not about setting a military alarm every twenty minutes, but about building the habit of standing up for a moment, changing position, moving a little.
Sometimes that means going to fill up your water bottle, sometimes it’s standing up to talk to a colleague, and sometimes it’s simply doing two or three small movements next to your desk.
In clinical physiotherapy we often suggest very basic micro-exercises, such as gentle neck movements (looking over each shoulder, tilting the head towards each side without forcing it), slow circles of the shoulders forwards and backwards, or small upper back extensions by placing your hands on the desk and gently lifting your chest to break out of the “hunched” shape.
For the wrists, it can help to do gentle flexion and extension movements, open and close your hands firmly, or rotate your forearms slowly in both directions. All of this in just a few seconds, without going into pain, simply reminding your body that it’s not trapped in one single position.
What really matters is that these small breaks become part of your routine, not an “extra” you only do on the days you remember. And here again, clinical physiotherapy can help you choose which movements make the most sense for your situation, depending on which areas complain the most.
Warning signs: when it’s time to get a professional assessment
Not every office ache is an emergency, but you also shouldn’t normalise everything. There are certain warning signs that tell us it’s a good time to have your situation assessed properly.
One of them is pain that radiates down the arm, either from the neck towards the shoulder and arm, or from the shoulder towards the elbow or hand. Another warning sign is the appearance of tingling, pins and needles or numbness in the hand or in specific fingers, especially if it repeats or persists.
Loss of strength is also something to take into account, for example noticing that objects slip from your hand, that opening jars is getting harder, or that your arm gets tired much faster than before.
The same goes for night pain that wakes you up or makes it hard to find a position to sleep, and for progressively worsening pain despite trying to change some things.
In all of these cases, clinical physiotherapy has a very clear role: assessing which structures may be irritated, how that relates to the way you work, and what type of treatment and exercises are most appropriate.
Sometimes it also means spotting when additional tests or a medical opinion are needed.
A simple weekly plan to get started without feeling overwhelmed
One of the most common mistakes is thinking that if you can’t do everything perfectly, there’s no point in doing anything. At Fisio Physio Clinic Salinas we prefer the opposite approach: start small, but start.
Imagine a really simple plan for your first week. For example, we might suggest three short blocks:
First, a couple of mobility movements for your neck and upper back, which you can do two or three times a day.
Something as simple as taking a minute to slowly turn your head from side to side, tilt it bringing your ear towards your shoulder, and do small upper-back extensions with your hands on the backrest or on the desk.
Second, some basic scapular activation to wake up the muscles that support your shoulders.
This could be, for example, gently drawing the shoulder blades towards each other, holding for a couple of seconds and relaxing, repeated several times. Or practising the feeling of “lowering your shoulders” from your ears into a more neutral position, without forcing it.
Third, a small space for breathing, which we often forget. Taking one or two minutes to sit with your back supported, breathe into the lower part of your ribcage and abdomen, and exhale slowly can help bring your overall tension down a notch.
On its own, it won’t fix a problem that’s been there for years, but it does send a calming signal to your nervous system.
This mini-plan doesn’t take an hour a day, nor does it require a mat or sports clothes. It’s a way of starting to say to your body: “I know you’re there, and I’m going to look after you a bit more.”
From clinical physiotherapy we can help you define these exercises, adapt them to your limitations and progress them over time.
How clinical physiotherapy can help you at Fisio Physio Clinic Salinas
By now, you probably sense that changing your ergonomics is more than just moving your chair a couple of centimetres.
At Fisio Physio Clinic Salinas we usually start with a calm assessment, where we’re not only interested in where it hurts, but also in what kind of job you do, how many hours you spend at the computer, whether you work from home or in an office, whether you’re at a counter, in a warehouse, or in a consulting room.
With all this information, clinical physiotherapy becomes something very concrete: hands-on treatment when it’s necessary to release, unload or calm a very irritated area; specific exercises for your neck, back, shoulders or wrists; and ergonomic adjustments that make sense for your real environment, not for a showroom office.
We also review with you what type of breaks and micro-exercises are most realistic. It’s not the same for someone on reception who can’t leave their chair, as for someone in an office with more freedom to get up, or for someone on a production line with very fixed timing.
Modern clinical physiotherapy is precisely about adapting the plan to the life you actually have, not to the one we wish you had.
During follow-up, we don’t just ask “Does it hurt less?”, but also:
- “How did you feel by the end of the week?”
- “Did you notice anything different on the days you took breaks?”
- “Which ergonomic changes were easier for you, and which ones were harder?”
- With those answers, we fine-tune the plan so it’s truly sustainable.
Does it make sense for us to see your case at the clinic?
If you’ve felt for a while that work is “taking a toll” on your body, if the same neck, back or shoulder pain shows up every week, or if you’ve already started noticing tingling, loss of strength or night pain, it might be time to stop improvising.
This is not about changing job, or becoming the most organised ergonomic expert overnight. It’s about not having to fight on your own against something we can tackle together through clinical physiotherapy.
At Fisio Physio Clinic Salinas we can assess how your body is doing, what it’s asking for each day and what room for manoeuvre you have in your specific job. From there, we design a plan that combines treatment, exercises and habit changes that are realistic, measurable and adapted to your life.
If you recognise yourself in these lines and feel that your “office pain” is no longer just an occasional annoyance, it might be a good time to come and see us.
A good assessment is often the first step for ergonomics to stop being an abstract concept and become something that genuinely helps you reach the end of the day with less pain and more energy.